last day of our road trip! 4of4

the last day of our trip was spent driving through texas, as per usual if you live in the center of this enormous state. 

this is about how things went during the road trip.

first things first. dallas. and ikea. remember how people love to say 'everything is bigger in texas'? well yeah, everything really is. LOOK at how spacious this ikea is. jon and i laughed at the very few tiny fake apartments that were set up in this particular ikea. living in small quarters is just not the way of life here.

the main reason we stopped in Dallas was to take the JFK assassination tour. we were a bit short on time and change (…), so we opted out of the JFK museum and in to the telephone walking tour. for $2.50 we put my phone on speaker and learned about the sites all over Dealey Plaza. This Dallas County Administration Building is where the JFK museum is and is the former Texas School Book Depository where they believe Lee Harvey Oswald did the deed from the 6th floor.

here is the view of the same building. the window is on the sixth floor on the very end. it looks different from all the rest, like it is permanently open. the tour didn't give us a reason for this, so one can only speculate...

a couple blocks from where JFK was assassinated sits a nice memorial for him. it was placed there in 1970 and was designed by Philip Johnson. Jackie Kennedy approved the site herself and johnson described his memorial as "a place of quiet refuge, an enclosed place of thought and contemplation separated from the city around, but near the sky and earth." we were there on a calm day, but walking into that room quieted the cars driving by and was exactly how he described it.

view of the triple underpass jfk's limo sped under on the way to the hospital after he'd been shot.

the infamous grassy knoll.

the x's are not official markers, and no one knows who originally painted them. they were there for over 30 years before the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination when the city of Dallas removed them for an unknown reason. (they were obviously repainted, as they were there 1.5 months later when we visited). the two x's supposedly mark where jfk's limousine was when the two shots were fired. we were excited to come to this location because my dad told us that conspiracy theorists were in abundance here, ready to tell you about their view of the events on november 22, 1963. as previously mentioned in my posts about this trip, this weekend was unusually cold. hardly anyone was out and about in dallas so unfortunately, we did not speak to any conspiracy theorists. jon got this good picture of both x's and a view of the window on the 6th floor.

it was a very interesting tour. i really want to go back and go through the museum to learn more about the investigations of that day as well as jfk's life.

on our way home, we stopped at in-n-out burger in austin. i've never been obsessed with in-n-out, but it was nice to have a taste of home that we've been missing so terribly.
our vacation was a blast, jon and i had so much fun on our road trip-seeing old friends and new places. and not to mention the car! every time i get in my car, i feel like i'm borrowing an old persons vehicle, it's awesome and much nicer than i am used to. with our plane tickets, gas, hotel and food plus the sales tax that was much higher than we were expecting, the car was still a better deal than we could have found locally. so not only did we get an awesome deal on the car (jon is so good at that stuff), but we got a vacation out of it and got to break our new car in. it was excellent! 

nashville!!! 3of4!

it was cold in knoxville, but not nashville cold:

we woke up early so that we could spend a few hours in nashville before heading to our next destination. it was a bummer because the city was sort of shut down due to the time of year and weather. the grand ole opry and the country music hall of fame were both closed.

water left in the car!

instead we went straight to centennial park where there is a full scale replica of the parthenon!

it was built for the tennessee centennial exposition in 1897.

athena.

this was all very interesting to me, as we had studied the parthenon and the sculptures on the pediment and frieze in deep detail in many of my classes. 

 

as you can see, it is not an exact replica. both long sides of the building were straight here, unlike the parthenon in athens. the greeks built the original parthenon using 'optical refinement' with curves to make the building look well balanced.

(i saw this little picture after our trip and immediately thought of our time in nashville)

we decided to go to the johnny cash museum because a. we like him and b. it was the only thing open! we loved learning about him and listening to his hit songs. my favorite part about the whole museum was the section where they had an american flag hanging with the lyrics to 'ragged old flag' along with a video of johnny reciting the lyrics. i had never heard this before, and i loved it so much. jon liked walking through the hallway where all of johnny's records were hung. that johnny was such a babe.

downtown nashville. 

i kept hoping we'd run into taylor swift or in the very least rayna james so i could tell her how pretty she is for an old lady.

does this give you an idea of how cold it was? the water fountain was frozen! i couldn't stand to look at the statues feet too closely because they were covered in ice and it made my own feet hurt!
nashville was a cute little city, i wish we could have spent more time there. maybe even on a warmer day…

my sister, lizziebeth, recommended we eat at the loveless cafe on our way out of nashville. we are so glad we did! the history of the cafe is so cool and the food was delicious. before we ordered they brought out hot biscuits with homemade preserves (four different choices!). they were soo good and so soft! we bought some preserves for our friends at church who taught our class of 5 year olds for almost a month while we were in utah and on our road trip, eek! if i could go back, i would have bought some for us too! it was yummy.

i loved the quaint atmosphere in the cafe. nashville was a highlight of our trip. it has a small town feel but is a big city with tons to see. we can't wait to go back.

our next stop was mephis, tennessee!! we looked on yelp to see where the best place to eat was and it sent us here-Gus's Fried Chicken. we weren't very hungry yet, but wanted to stop in memphis. all we got was fried chicken with fried pickles and we felt about as good as you'd expect we would after that meal. our waiter was a former marine who had been stationed at camp pendleton in SD. he was so kind and even offered to buy jon a beer "no homo". cutie jon politely declined because 'we have a drive ahead of us…' he was so cute though, it is such a small world!!! memphis was pretty scary and we worried about leaving our car around the corner from the restaurant while we ate. a few weeks later i talked to someone about that city and they informed me that it is a bit ghetto…we could tell by the broken windows and run down buildings. haha. as soon as we left memphis we crossed a bridge over the mississippi river into arkansas!!! it was so cool, i don't think either of us have ever crossed it before! i hadn't even seen the mississip!

Little Rock, Arkansas!! we had my dad google the best single thing to do in little rock and i think elvis's house was number one. it was late so we went with number 2: the big dam bridge. it is the longest pedestrian bridge in north america that "wasn't ever used by trains or motor vehicles" at 4,226 feet. we walked the whole way across and back, just to say we did! it was still so cold, but it was good to get out of the car and stretch our legs. was it pleasant? no, not really. it was actually very eerie. the dam with rushing water was so loud and violent. looking over the edge reminded me of the end of the new les miserables movie were the guy commits suicide. (if you haven't seen the movie or play or read the book, where have you been since 1862??) it was super creepy. we threw some change in, but i didn't make a real wish because i didn't want my wish to be sucked into the dam and tossed about. it just didn't feel right.
we really did have fun walking across and talking and laughing. it's so nice to be with jon without any worries about school or work or the distraction of technology. traveling with him is the funnest, we are always laughing.

we finally stopped for the night in Texarkana. a city that sits both in texas and arkansas and not a place i'd like to visit again. we made reservations for a room at La Quinta. we stopped at one and she said we were on the texas side of town and needed to be at the la quinta in arkansas. like we can tell the difference! we drove ACROSS THE STREET to the right la quinta! weirdest!

p.s. i put our christmas card up just a few weeks late..
here