Happy Trails

This Spring Break, we had planned on heading south to San Antonio. Gas went up and my mom had to work so we decided to do Spring Break here. Even though we’ve lived in the local area for seven years, we hadn’t done a lot of touristy things. We decided to visit the Ft. Worth stockyards. The Ft. Worth Stockyards was a main cattle holding area in the 1800’s – before the days of the train. Cowboys would drive their herds to Ft. Worth for distribution throughout the country. After the advent of the railroad – Ft. Worth was still a big town in the cattle industry. The Stockyards are now a tourist destination and night spot. Ft Worth is still known as Cow Town.

Every day – rain or shine, the cowboys simulate a cattle drive through the middle of the stockyards twice a day.



Here are the boys waiting for the “cattle drive” to start Instead of “Cheese” Charles had them all say “Beef”



Here’s the start of the cattle drive.



There were cowboys!



This man is the drive boss. He leads the drive



This guy was the leader of the pack. Later on we learned that the leader usually wore a cowbells. Stragglers could hear the bell and follow along.



As the “drive” progressed we didn’t hear a lot of mooing. In fact, most of them were not real happy to be walking down the street while people gawked and took pictures. I think some of them were teenaged cows. I swear I even heard one of them sigh. All in all they had a BTDT air about them.







This man is called the drag. Charles and Tommy thinks that the side riders were called drags because they dragged slow cattle.



These guys appear to be sulking. I guess I would too if all I had to do was walk along the road twice a day



This is the end of the drive



We ate lunch at Risky's BBQ. The ribs were YUMMY and the beans and fixins were DIVINE. On the wall they had neon signs and Texas memorabilia. One of the signs was for Lone Star Beer. Lone Star Beer and it's neighbor - Pearl - are a college studen't dream - cheap - and well yeah cheap. Both are really bad beers.

Lone star was founded the Adolphus Busch. in the 1880's and made san Antonio a leader in brewing. Today Lone star is owned by Pabst ands brewed in Ft Worth.



The Stockyards have a lot of replica stores – little specialty shops and an old timey General store that sells Texas things. They had rocks. Because we don’t have enough rocks, the kids thought we needed some



they also had spice rubs



and salsa



They also sold Dublin Dr. Pepper – Dr. Pepper made with pure cane sugar not corn syrp and blue bell ice cream – can’t get much more Texas than that. Seriously, Dublin Dr. Pepper made the ORIGIONAL way is a taste treat.

This “Indian” guy cracked me up. You could take his picture for tips. He wasn’t a real Indian and didn’t know anything about the stuff he was displaying – a bad combination for a smart aleck 7th grader who delighted in pointing out inaccuracies in the man’s costumes. Joey want to get on the horse so I gave the guy a couple of bucks (Eric almost belted him when the guy made a comment about the $5 tip we gave him because we had an expensive camera) - any ay I took the picture of Joey on the horse and when I uploaded it died laughing at the “stoic Indian warrior” pose the guy gave. I call thise one “Cheesy Like Velveeta”