Day 157 - Dallas, Texas - 7th January 2005 Today my borther's wife, Carolyn, agreed to look after the boys for the day. This included home schooling them in the morning and taking them with her when she went to collect her own 2 girls from school (she has 2 older girls who have left home already). Julie and I (boyless for the first time during the day for what seems like for ever but must only have been when they were last at school during December) headed into downtown Dallas proper. 

This is a 50 minute drive from where we are but we also agreed to take one of the girls to school in the morning, as we would be taking one of the cars for the day. Everything here starts early. School starts at 7:30 am (that is unless you have basketball (or some other team sport) practice and then you start at 6:30 am) and finishes at 2:30 (that is unless you have basketball (or some other team sport) practice and then you finish at 4:00pm. The two school age nieces I have here are often at school for 8 or 9 hours. One has been at school for 12 hours once. They are aged 12 and 15. They go to school with one sandwich, an apple, a couple of biscuits and a bottle of water. They will often come home with a couple of hours of homework just to make sure they are not slipping. 

Offices have the same routine. It seems that the schools prepare them for this. They start at 8:00pm and go to 5:00pm but typically work on to around 6:00 or later. So in order to get Jennie to school we are up at just after 6:00am and we leave just before 7:00am. Jenny is 12 and goes to a private Christian school about half an hour away in a town called Grapevine. There are no school buses to this school (although there are many to the local schools) and in Texas there in no, none, zip public transport. The only way to get anywhere is therefore by car. This is OK for Mom (as she is called over here) if she doesn't have to go to 2 different schools or do too many activities afterwards. It can become very hectic. 

Something else that is mind blowing over here: you can drive at 15. Yup 15 years old. Sophie, another niece here, drove to school by herself starting at the age of 15. The car parks at some of the local high schools cater for over 1,000 student cars. So we drop Jennie at school just before 7:30am (it's still dark here) and head off to Dallas. We hit all the commuter traffic but it still seems like a Sunday morning in comparison to the QEW to Toronto or the M1 coming into London. The Highway are pretty easy to navigate as long as you know the direction you are travelling (north, south, east and west). To a european this is not an inherant skill. When the weather is poor around here it's very difficult to know. The land is flat and it all looks the same. So when the Highwas is marked up as "Highway 35 W (for West) North" it means this is called Highway 35 East but you are going in a Northerly direction. Is that clear? It became clear to us eventually. Dallas and Fort Worth are 2 cities that sit side by side (like Minneapolis/St.Paul). They are connected by a highway (Hwy 30) and in between sits the DFW airport which is one of the biggest in the world in size. 

The city of Dallas could be walked in a morning and the city of Fort Worth could be walked in 1 and half hours. Although both have huge buildings they are in fact very small. Fort Worth in about the size of Ealing. We went first to the Sixth Floor Museum of the old Texas School Bookstore Depository from where President Kennedy was shot on November 22nd 1963. We got there as it opened at 9:00am and were the first through the turnpike for the day. I had been here previously 33 years ago and nothing had changed. Julie loved it especially as it would not have been a place we would have visited with boys. There really was nothing to see but to read the story boards about the assassination and to see the window from where the shots were fired (or so the story goes). We enjoyed it immensely. We then drove the 30 minutes from Dallas to Fort Worth. Incredibly the weather changed from being drizzly, overcast and cold to blue sky and sunshine as we drove this short distance. 

Fort Worth has some much older buildings and a very lively little downtown section know as Sundance Square. Sophie, who we were visiting in Fort Worth, works for Radio Shack in their world headquarters which are located there. She is in marketing in the digital imaging division, assisting in the marketing and promotion of digital cameras in Radio Shack stores. This company has 7,000 stores. 4,000 owned by the company and 3,000 owned by franchisees. Imagine how many digital cameras they shift? Sophie deals with many of the suppliers of these cameras and had a desk full of the latest (many yet to be released) cameras. A geeks dream. The Radio Shack Corporation has just moved into brand spanking new purpose built offices that are simply gorgeous. Floor to ceiling windows all around (my favourite), open plan offices, little cafes on each floor, huge restaurant on the ground floor. I was amazed. She then showed me the company's computer support operations department. In a room lit only from the glow of computer screens and very dim lights were four of five rows of about 15 computer stations. They were all facing the same direction looking towards a solid wall of screens and panels. The only way to describe it was that it looked just like mission control at Houston. Each station had 3 large flat panels arranged like a dressing table mirror, slightly curving in around the sides. Each operator, who was equipped with headset and mike, was dealing with a computer issue generated either by a worker in the offices or any of the dealers in the network. Price changes and till receipts were being monitored worldwide. As far as I was concerned this was where it was at. I would work there for nothing.