The one with Dallas

I’m not overly impressed but not disappointed.  It’s not a raving review but neither is it glaring.  Dallas is …. Dallas.

Dallas became home on April 23, 2011 and it’s now June 3 so I’d say the introductory phase is over.  We kinda know our way around, we’ve discovered a great $1 sushi place, we found a Snap Fitness to workout at occasionally, the dogs and I frequent a nearby set of baseball fields for morning walks when the weather permits and in general, things are good.  It’s home.  For now.

The weather here confuses me a little.  The first 3 weeks of our visit brought the most beautiful mornings one could hope for.  Cool, breezy and just plain enjoyable.  Those mornings were great baseball field days.  The dogs and I would pack up breakfast, drop John off at work and then we’d enjoy our kibbles at the park followed by a good walk.  We saw geese, ducks, fish, turtles, a fish that jumped out of the nearby pond, a dead snake in the road and one day I even spied a dark dog-like creature running into nearby trees with its own breakfast.  Then, Mother Nature presented about a week or so of muggy gross mornings.  Currently, the mornings are not those found in CO but they’re close.  Drop the temperature 10 degrees and it would be really close.  The late afternoons remind me of San Antonio … just hot and muggy.  There is also a pretty regular breeze that is CO-esque and completely unlike San Antonio.  In conclusion, I’ve found the weather to be right in between that of CO and San Antonio.  Maybe it leans a bit more toward SA.  :)

The biggest drawback, I think, is that it feels difficult to get anywhere around here.  Dallas is hard to get around and is without any major redeeming factor to make it worth putting up with the hardness here.  You just can’t travel across town during the week, weekend, morning nor evening without dealing with traffic.  San Antonio has traffic but nothing this difficult.  I could easily time my errands to avoid traffic in SA.  I remember Denver having traffic but nothing this hard.  There is ALWAYS an accident and it seems like it ALWAYS takes 30 minutes just to travel 10 miles.

I do enjoy living in a large town again.  It’s nice to have so many restaurants to choose from that you know you’ll never come close to visiting them all on your weekend outings.   I also enjoy receiving what feels like 10 Groupons a day.  Yet, it doesn’t seem that Dallas offers anything overly unique or fantastic to keep my attention.  I felt pretty sure that the daily Farmer’s Market would be it until we went down there.  It is very nice to have the Farmer’s Market open daily but it’s hard to get downtown where it’s located.  It’s also in a less than I-feel-safe-going-by-myself location.  Admittedly, there are a lot of fruits and veggies to choose from … or maybe I should say there are a lot of fruit and veggie vendors to choose between.  But sadly, nothing so exciting that I’d want to go visit weekly.

We visited Canton Trade Days last weekend in Canton, TX.  I heard great reviews about how much shopping there is to do at Trade Days and how large the event is.  Once we figured out where to go, I have to admit you can buy just about anything you want there.  The vendors are spread out in about 3-4 different groups around town.  I think visiting in the fall would be a nice experience for the purposes of Christmas shopping but  last weekend it was just so hot and the majority of the shopping is outdoors in metal arbors.  We found it actually cooler to be outside in the triple digit heat than in the shaded arbors that seemed to hold in the heat.

This weekend we’ll visit downtown Carrollton.  The RV park we’re at is actually in Carrollton and their downtown area looks like it could be cute with a few little shops and maybe even a little town square.  I don’t expect to spend more than a couple hours there but it does look cute from the highway.

So I guess in summary, I’d rate Dallas a 5.  I’m not in a huge hurry to actively get out of town but at the same time I could have HaRVy packed up and ready to head out in about 1.5 hours. 

This entry was posted on Tue, Jun 07 2011 at 07:34 and is filed under Vanessa's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.