Eclipses are strange.
On one hand, eclipses are predictable as almost nothing else. You can calculate the time and duration of an eclipse happening 500 years from now by the second.
But on the other hand, being able to see an eclipse (and by that, I mean being able to see the moon eclipsing the sun, as opposed to things simply getting dark for a few minutes) is as dependent on the weather during a few minutes as almost nothing else is.
If there's bad weather in any other situation, it's along generic lines of 'what will be the temperature tomorrow' or 'will it rain this weekend'.
With eclipses it becomes a lot more specific, down to where in the sky a cloud might be during a four-minute timeslot.
Going to watch an eclipse is nerve-wracking.
As much as you try to do other stuff during the trip, the whole "was it worth it?" comes down to whether the sun was in sight or behind a cloud.
In order not to make a drama out of it: Yes, things worked out fine.
That spares me the temptation to make a mystery out of whether I did see the eclipse. Which would be futile anyway, as scrolling down a bit would show the eclipse pictures anyway.
The path of total eclipse went across a large part of North America, starting in Mexico and crossing the US states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine before moving though Canada via Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
While that provided a large number of places to travel to for watching the eclipse, it also made it difficult to choose a specific one.
In the end I decided to go to Texas.
It was the best compromise between road infrastructure, average April cloud cover and language.
Weather was the easiest thing to figure out. The average cloud cover increased the further east the path went.
Mexico had the lowest risk of clouds (especially in the desert areas) and Canada the highest, with an almost constant rate of increase.
It made sense to be as far south-west as possible.
But as I can speak English, but not Spanish, the US seemed like a more convenient choice than Mexico. (It didn't make much of a difference for the eclipse, but it made the other activities easier. I don't think I would have enjoyed improv theatre in Spanish. Also, if I want to see an eclipse in a Spanish speaking country, there's always the 2026 eclipse.)
More relevant was the road infrastructure.
If, on a cloudy day, satellite pictures (or looking up) did show a hole in the cloud layer a couple of miles away, could I drive there easily?
While the lowest chance of cloud would have been in a desert in Mexico, deserts don't have that many roads. If I would have gone to a place like Mapimí and there had been a small, but dense cloud cover, I would have been stuck there with no alternative place to go.
In the end, I decided to go to Waco, TX. It has roads going off in all directions, it was pretty much in the center of the eclipse path, with an eclipse duration of 4m13s and it was far enough from Dallas, so that traffic jams caused by people in Dallas, looking for a hole in the clouds, wouldn't affect me much.
But when I tried to find a place to stay, about a year before the eclipse, most places in Texas were in 'gold rush' mode and hotel prices were ridiculously high. A motel, with usual prices of $78 per night asked for $750 per night, while a rental cottage, usually at $400/night wanted to charge around $3500.
Prices like that don't last long.
Properties assume there will be a big rush for the event and try to charge a silly amount, as it seems "worth a try". In the end, market forces prevail, nobody books at these prices and half a year later, all goes back to normal.
I wanted to plan and book my trip early. And didn't want to wait for the prices to go down. I looked for places that weren't asking for inflated prices and found one in Athens, TX. No idea whether they didn't want to be seen as greedy or whether they missed the news about the upcoming eclipse. But they asked for normal prices. Which, in a way, worked for them, as I stayed there instead of Waco.
While Athens was a bit further away from the center of the eclipse path, it had the same basic advantages as Waco. It is a small place, sufficiently far away from large population centers, like Dallas / Fort Worth and has roads leading out in all directions.
As I was in the US for about a week, I had, basically, three days to do things somewhere, with a travel day between them.
So I drove down to Austin, spent a day there, drove up to Athens, to see the eclipse, and then drove to Dallas to spend a day there. And flew back the next day.
The first thing I went to see in Austin was the troll.
Although not that troll.
That was only a "pointing in the right direction" troll at a street crossing.
The real troll was sitting in a shady glade between the trees.
It was pure coincidence that I knew about the troll.
I had been talking with my sister the week before I went to Texas. And she mentioned that she had visited a giant troll sculpture in Denmark the previous month.
She explained that the troll was the creation of a Danish artist called Thomas Dambo, who has built more than 100 giant trolls out of recycled wood. And while the densest population of troll sculptures is, not surprisingly, in Denmark, there are trolls in many other countries as well. There's even a convenient troll map, showing most of them.
As I would be travelling to the US the following week, I looked whether there was one in Texas. And whether that would be anywhere near where I would be going.
To my surprise, I found that there was one right in the middle of Austin. Where I had been planning to go anyway.
So Malin (the name of the troll) was going to be the first thing to visit in Austin.
I was a bit baffled that I didn't know about the giant troll statue in Austin. Usually, strange and slightly obscure things are what I look for when I'm travelling somewhere. But I hadn't found anything about the troll.
And I couldn't locate it on Google Maps either.
It turned out that the Austin troll was brand new.
Constructing Malin had been finished two or three weeks earlier, so there hadn't been any information about it when I was looking up "things to do and see in Austin" months before. And nobody had updated Google Maps yet. (It has been updated since.)
Following the idea that, ideally, encountering the trolls should be a surprise (many of them are 'hidden' somewhere in the woods), there are no signs in Pease Park to tell you where the troll is. You have to find it on your own. It's not a tough challenge - the park isn't huge and the troll is in an easily accessible location. Or, at least for now, you can simply follow everyone else.
Currently, you can also find some of the leftovers from building Malin.
The troll is mostly built from wood taken from old forklift wood pallets.
Of course, there are also other materials used. Mostly in the hairs (tree roots) and in the necklace (rocks, antlers and a large piece of glass).
There's a lot of attention to detail.
Like placing two screws in each eye of the troll.
As the eyes are large black discs, they could look dead or staring unnaturally. But the two screws provide little highlights (technically called specular highlights), making the eyes come to life and the troll more 'human' and less 'monster'.
It was interesting to watch people bringing 'offerings' to the troll.
This is an expected, even encouraged, behavior.
The full name of the sculpture is "Malin's Fountain" and there's a little marker with a poem beside the troll, mentioning the thirst of summer birds and empty drains.
It's strongly implied that visitors should bring some water with them and put it into the bowl the troll is holding, which then serves as a bird bath.
While it might not be that important for local birds (there's a brook called Shoal Creek not far away from the troll, so birds will usually be able to find water there), but it's a nice gesture to leave some water.
Although for many visitors it seemed to be an almost spiritual thing. Instead of simply emptying a water bottle into the bowl, people paused and slowly poured water into the bowl. It's hard to describe without making it sound odd, but I doubt that they would pour out water in their dog's or cat's bowl the same way.
After visiting the troll, I went to see some of the more regular sightseeing spots in Austin, such as the Texas Capitol.
In the park surrounding the Texas Capitol are a lot of cheeky (and not particularly shy) squirrels, behaving as if they own the place (which would explain a lot...)
Especially one of them had the three-point landing pose (also known as superhero landing pose) down pat. If everyone ever has the crazy idea of doing a live-action Iron Man remake with squirrels (or, if it's a female squirrel, a Black Widow remake), than this squirrel deserves a starring role.
While walking back from the Texas Capitol to the hotel, I noticed that there was an Improv Theatre around the corner from the hotel and there would be a show that evening. I bought a ticket and went there in the evening.
The actors were good and the evening was fun, but the whole thing felt a bit flat. And I wondered why.
Mostly it seemed they weren't courageous enough.
For me, the appeal of improv theatre is that things sometimes go in unexpected directions. And situations are played out that any writer would edit out immediately, as they are too silly or not properly established.
And those often are the most exciting bits. I've seen Captain Kirk using a (non-existing) egg-beater to fight of a leprechaun. And that was amazing.
A detective helping a damsel (in distress) to retrieve her wedding ring from a mob boss - well, that was unscripted and thus improvised, but it steps into so many previous footsteps that it allows the actors to fall into stereotypes and makes the dialog sound like a mix-tape of Sam Spade quotes.
There were some 'improv games' I hadn't seen before (there always are - it's not like I am an expert on improv), but sometimes they didn't prompt improvisation much. (Unless the actors run with them, which they didn't.)
In one scene, the audience was asked for "coordinating conjunctions", which are (in short) words and phrases that tie sentences together. Like "and", "however", "therefore", "but", "yet", "not ignoring that", "referring to this".
And during a scene dialog, the director was throwing out words and phrases (that the audience had suggested) and the actors needed to continue their text with that word.
Which, if played straight by the rules, is boring.
Because either it's a positive conjunction, then you carry on as before. Or it's a negative one and you simply state something contradicting that. The conjunctions become interchangeable.
Giving an example, you can start with a sentence about walking therefore you mention various running tracks not ignoring that it can get dangerous at some intersections and you need to be careful however the benefits of walking overwhelm the risk refering to this you can mention how well it worked for your friend.
But you can replace most of the conjunctions with an equivalent and it doesn't make much of a difference:
Giving an example, you can start with a sentence about walking and you mention various running tracks but it can get dangerous at some intersections referring to this you need to be careful not ignoring that the benefits of walking overwhelm the risk therefore you can mention how well it worked for your friend.
It's all a bit arbitrary and doesn't prompt improvisation much.
As the audience was great, it became even more obvious. They provided some good phrases like "and in regard to your e-mail from the 3rd of the month", which implies a certain formality. Of course, the actor can simply say "walking is good and and in regard to your e-mail from the 3rd of the month I could point out some good tracks", be done with it and continue as before (and that is what happened). The interesting challenge, however, would have been to switch the speech pattern of the text following the phrase, going from informal chatting to a more pompous style. As: "walking is good and and in regard to your e-mail from the 3rd of the month as I am quite the connoisseur of solitary ambulation, I have published a scholarly monograph regarding thoroughfares of historic or scenic interest" and then switching to an informal or rough speaking pattern after the next but.
There's was also one segment where an interviewer talks to one other 'person', which is played by three actors and each can only say one word at the time.
It's an easy exercise. So easy that they had one member of the audience sitting in as one of the three.
Which undermined it, as that leads to sentences that are predictable. After "hello", "how", "are", it's likely that it continues "you" "today".
This scene works best if the actors are competitive (which they aren't with an audience member). Yes, improv encourages cooperation and isn't about upstaging others, but this is one of the places where it helps.
If a scene starts with "Hello" and "how", it becomes more interesting and open when the next word is "horses", as it throws the next actor of the 'obvious phrase' and forces, well, to improvise. Which is a good thing in improv.
But you don't want to get an audience member get caught out with that.
Speaking of audience members: The best scene was the other scene that had an audience member in it as a "foley artist", providing sound effects. A scene develops, in which various objects are interacted with ("Let's open the freezer and see what's in it!") and the audience member makes some sound. It can get boring if the sound is obvious, but the audience member was great and she made all sorts of unexpected noises. If you open a freezer and it makes train noises, then the acted scene can take an unexpected turn. Or peeling an apple makes a boom sound. This forced the actors to react and improvise in new ways. And that was fun. But it was the audience member who made that happen.
A lot of the evening felt more like "how to handle hecklers" than "improv", as the actors often tried to build in the audience suggestion as quickly and unobtrusively as possible and tried to keep the scene they were playing going, instead of going off in different directions.
It was most noticeable in the big post-intermission scene.
During intermission, the audience was asked to write some phrase or line on a small strip of paper and put that in a bucket.
When the last scene started, the strips of paper were thrown all over the stage. And from time to time a signal was given that an actor should pick up a strip of paper and use that line.
Which is a great way to de-rail a scene and put it on a different track. It opens up a lot of possibilities. And changes.
Or you can simply say the line, keep it out of context and go on with the scene you're playing.
If you have a gritty scene about a battle between fast food stands on opposite sides of the road and someone picks up a strip saying "The princess is in another castle", this can lead to a strange, wild and possibly interesting story.
But if you pre-face it with "Well, there's something my mother always used to say:", pick up the paper, say "The princess is in another castle" and follow up with "My mother was a strange woman and said many odd things.", then you have technically used the audience suggestion, but it had no effect at all on the scene. The paper could have said: "It's an all-expenses paid trip to Barbados" and the scene would have continued the same way. While the two lines, if not framed as something external to be commented upon, but as something the character genuinely said at that moment, would have taken the scene in completely different directions.
In summary: It was solid acting and an enjoyable evening, but it wasn't what I hope for when I watch improv.
I spent a lot of the next day crawling around on my hands and knees.
And that were the easy parts. It was harder to do the low crawling on my stomach and elbows.
But I like caves. Especially close up.
About half an hour drive north of Austin, in Georgetown, is the Inner Space Cavern.
The cave is close to the highway. And that's not a coincidence. (It was a coincidence that there was a cave, but the highway was a given.) When they were planning a highway bridge in 1963, they wanted to make sure that the ground underneath was solid and would bear the weight of the bridge. So they did some drilling and were presumably surprised that there was a cave below. It didn't affect the building of the bridge (there are 15 feet of solid rock over the cave, which is presumably enough to bear the bridge safely - after all, they did build the bridge and it hasn't collapsed yet). If they highway hadn't been nearby, the probably still wouldn't have noticed the cave.
As there aren't any 'natural' entrances to the cave and the discovery was comparatively recent, the cave is in a good state. 'Older' caves often have stalactites and stalagmites removed by early spelunkers as souvenirs.
Part of it is a showcave with constructed trails and stairs and artificial illumination.
There are regular guided tours there, called "Adventure Tours". There is also a tour along some undeveloped trails, the "Hidden Passages Tour". These are like the regular trails, so you can walk normally, although you have to keep your head down under some protruding rock or in a low passage. The main difference from the "Adventure Tour" is that there's no illumination installed on the "hidden passages", so you walk around with a flashlight.
And then there is, twice a week, the "Wild Cave Tour", where you leave the walkable passages and go through much smaller openings, crawl spaces and (literally) get your hands dirty. (And your trousers. And your t-shirt. And pretty much everything else as well. They tell you to bring a full set of fresh clothing to change into after the tour. And that's good advice.
While there are some places where you can stand up, for most of the way you can, at best, walk in a crouch.
The entrance to the 'wild' part of the cave was unusual. It didn't involve some obscure side track from the main trails. The start of the tour was in a illuminated section belonging to the main trail.
So we stepped of the main trail, walked over the rocks and crawled down a small hole among them.
The whole thing felt as if you want to go 'backstage' in a museum. And instead of going through an unmarked and unremarkable side door, you need to step into one of the exhibits and use an entrance that is hidden there. Or like a zoo, where you enter the administration office through a door in the zebra enclosure.
There was a lot of crawling around.
It was really a chance to go 'close and personal' with the cave floor.
I haven't any good picture of this. Every time we were in a tight passage (I think the guide mentioned that the smallest bit is only 26 inches wide) I didn't have time to get the camera out (most of the time, there wouldn't have been enough room to reach for the camera in my pocket). So pictures are mostly from the slightly wider spaces, where we could sit and wait for the rest of the group to crawl in.
There were some spaces that were flat, but wide. So there wasn't enough room above to crawl on your knees. So you needed to lie on your belly, with one leg out to the side and then push yourself forward like a lizard.
It was fun!
(Although I didn't do some of the optional sections. Some of them required some corkscrew like contortions, while others didn't allow much use of hands and feet, but required more of a caterpillar motion. Probably a good way to check how well your yoga classes worked. But those things were optional (although I did do the maze) and could be either walked around or they wound back to the place they started from.)
We spent roughly three hours in the 'wild' parts of the cave.
Then we were back in the illuminated 'showcave' part of the cavern.
We came back to that part by a different route, using some of the trails from the 'Hidden Passages' tour. We didn't need to squeeze upward through the small hole we used at the beginning of the tour.
After a short walk, we were back at the part of the showcave where we had gone off-trail and down into the 'wild' part.
We had taken a 'before' picture, so now it was time for the 'after' picture.
Then it was time to walk out of the cave and go for a (sorely needed) change of clothes.
Especially as I was going to meet a former colleague for barbecue.
We worked together in the late 90's and he and his wife left for the USA in 1999.
I did visit him once when he was working in San Jose, CA, but he's living in Texas now, so it was a good opportunity to pay him a visit again (and one visit every two decades doesn't seem overbearing).
In any case, I didn't want to visit him looking like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts, so it was a good thing that I brought a full set of fresh clothing to change into after the cave tour.
Next day, I drove back north to Athens to be in the right place to see the eclipse the day after that.
The weather reports weren't cause for optimism.
A massive cloud front was coming in from the south-west, already covering most of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. And it was heading inland.
At the same time, there were, slightly less severe and slower moving, clouds coming in from the north-west.
According to the weather forecast, there was a little bit of a 'blue corridor' right along the path of the eclipse, but it looked a bit like the area between two scissor blades, and it became smaller every hour.
I was roughly at the point where the red dot is on the map.
The forecast (from the previous evening) for the time of the eclipse essentially came down to "there might still be a view of the sun (give or take some thin high-level clouds, which won't matter much), but there also might be a thick cloud layer".
Half an hour before totality, the sky at my location didn't look good.
At that time, the eclipse had, technically, already begun, with the moon already covering some of the sun.
A short time later, the clouds started to open up a bit, and I got some glances of the sun.
Still some clouds in the way, but they no longer continuously blocked the view. Now the main question was: Where would the clouds be during the (roughly) four minutes of totality?
It turned out the answer would be: Mostly somewhere else.
Around totality (and for the hour after that), the sky looked (at least where the sun was) clear.
While there were still some thin, high layer clouds in the sky, visibility was good and watching the eclipse was amazing!
In reality, the sky doesn't look as black as it seems in most images. It's only because pictures of the sun's corona look better when they aren't over-exposed, that the rest of the image is under-exposed, and thus nearly black.
Standing there and looking up, the sky does look more like a dark blue (instead of black) and the eclipse looks like a black hole suddenly appearing in the sky. (As someone put it: "A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.")
During totality, I also managed to spot two planets. Jupiter and Venus. Venus was bright and obvious in the sky. Jupiter was fainter and isn't that easy to see on pictures, but more obvious on site, as it was a steady point of light compared to the shifting clouds.
And the open sky lasted until the end of the '5th stage' of the eclipse, when the moon completely had passed the face of the sun.
So while the typical series of eclipse phase pictures starts a bit late, as the sun was behind the clouds when things started, it goes right to the end.
(The moon obviously doesn't change direction when passing in front of the sun, but I had to move the camera at some point to keep the sun in view and that slightly changed the angle of the camera sensor in relation to the sun.)
A couple of hours later, the weather report had got it right. Thunderstorms over Athens, Texas and flash floods in other parts of Texas (although the predicted 'tennis ball sized hail' failed to materialize anywhere).
But the weather was good when it mattered. And that's all that matters.
Lucky day.
It took a lot of planning, time and resources to be there for the eclipse. And I had been taking the risk that it might not work out. (As the US National Weather Service phrased it: "April in south central Texas is in the middle of our primary severe weather season. Storms producing frequent lightning, large hail, damaging winds, tornadoes, and flooding can all occur here during that time period.") But it did work out in the end, making the whole trip worthwhile.
(My former colleague down in Austin was less lucky - he had overcast skies during the eclipse.)
The only thing left to do was to drive to Dallas and fly home.
But I had a full spare day in Dallas, so I tried to fit in as much as possible.
The weather the next day would also have been unsuitable for eclipse watching, but at least there was a nice rainbow to be seen while driving to Dallas.
Since I was arriving in Dallas too early to check in, I went to see the airplane museum in Dallas.
At first it looked odd, as if some exhibits had gone missing.
All the planes were along the sides of the main hall, leaving a big, empty space in the middle.
I thought that they had moved exhibits for their 'solar eclipse event' the previous day. But it seems that they do a lot of events and receptions at the museum. And they keep the central area clear to be able to cater for those more easily.
It is often the case, that collections in aircraft museums are a bit random. You can't easily buy decommissioned planes following a common theme, but mostly you take what becomes available.
It often creates an odd mix of war planes, commercial planes, stunt planes, historic planes, oddities, replica and space crafts.
There also show a number of rare exhibits that few other museums have.
One of them is the original command module of Apollo 7, the first Apollo mission that actually went into space with astronauts on board.
Another one is a Vought V-173, better known as "Flying Pancake", an attempt to build a plane that is all-wings. I'm not sure what advantages they expected from this. It seems that the design is good for flying at low speeds, but there are not many advantages in having a slow plane.
It did actually fly (even though it looks more like a design prototype than something that can get airborne). And, given the shape, it probably caused a few "flying saucer" rumors.
Only one of them was ever built.
The museum also had a lot about local aviation history, especially about Southwest Airlines, which has its headquarters at the airport where the museum is located. And also Braniff Airways, which I didn't know much about, but which had been a big player in the 1970s, but stopped operating in 1982.
If supersonic airplanes had been a success, Braniff would probably be the US airline to fly them.
The had pre-ordered the Boeing SST when it was in development. And when that development programme was cancelled, they were the only company flying a Concorde in the US (between Dallas and Washington D.C.; and only subsonic).
I didn't know that (even though I've read a lot about Concordes). I always thought that Air France and British Airways had been the only ones flying Concorde.
Braniff only operated the domestic Concorde route for less than 18 months. There were a couple of odd arrangements involved - it seems that, as a domestic route, only Braniff would be allowed to offer it. And it needed to be their planes. So before every flight, Braniff bought a Concorde at Washington D.C. from Air France or British Airways for a dollar. Thus, it would be legally and administratively a Braniff plane. And then sold it back for the same symbolic amount to the original owner.
After visiting the airplane museum, I still was a bit too early for check in (at least I thought so - later I found out that I was four months too late). Initially I wanted to see the Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, but that isn't open on Tuesdays, so I went to the aquarium instead. Which is only a short walk away.
The aquarium turned out to be surprising popular, with a long queue halfway around the block. And that was a normal weekday. I wondered whether a new exhibit had recently opened, whether there was some special event or whether a bus-load full of people had just arrived. But it seems like that was the typical crowd.
At least they seem to be good in handling that, as the queue moved swiftly and I was in the aquarium after less than 10 minutes wait.
It's not much of an aquarium, though. In fact, I was on my way out of the building when I happened to find where they hid the fish.
Most of the building is an attempt to recreate different ecosystems, like a rainforest or the fauna of the Yucatan peninsula.
There was a lot of moisture in the air. A wide selection of plants. A few birds. But not much aquatic life.
The crocodile they had was, however, impressive.
It was huge. And it had an ancient look. Like it had been there forever and they built the aquarium around it.
The trail through the museum seemed linear, starting at the top and then winding down towards the exit.
But then there was a little corridor going off to one side. And that's where they keep the fish.
Most of the fish tank are surprisingly small (for an aquarium).
But they do have one big shark tank, with a tunnel going through it.
The whole experience was a bit strange. But that may have been because I expected a 'traditional' aquarium. If they had called it "The Dallas Cloudforest Experience", I would have gone in with another attitude. And maybe had liked it more.
Then again, the whole point of going in there was to waste some time. And that worked as planned.
I tried to check into my hotel, but then found out that there wasn't one. I had made a booking, but hadn't noticed that it wasn't a hotel room, but an individual apartment. Which would have been fine, if the tenant of the apartment hadn't been kicked out four months earlier for illegally subletting the apartment to tourists.
So I needed to book me into a regular hotel instead. Which was quickly done. And in the end, there wasn't any real problem. But I could have checked into that hotel hours earlier and skipped the aquarium.
I had booked a guided tour of the AT&T stadium (where the Dallas Cowboys play football) for the next day. Mostly because I couldn't think of anything else to do.
The building is huge.
I knew that most of the roof can open, but I wasn't aware that the huge window fronts at both ends of the building are doors and can slide open as well.
It wasn't much of a football fan experience, though.
Early April is as off-season as it gets in football.
So they are doing other events there, such as an recreational vehicle presentation.
Which makes economic sense, of course, but it looks somewhat odd in a sports arena.
And it makes the greenscreen picture they make of you during the tour even more ridiculous.
It already looks fake due to the crowds in the stadium. And the composition looks off. (In general, greenscreen looks much more convincing if you keep the legs in the frame and add some light shadow on one side. This 'anchors' a person visually in the environment and looks better.)
But it looks even more at odds with reality when all the other images show the place full of RVs.
In any case, the more interesting things on the tour are the ones you don't see much on sport broadcasts.
There was a chance to see one of the suites.
Very comfortable and good views. But looking a bit old-fashioned. However, they are starting to re-design the interior.
The reason for this is, somewhat surprising, not football (US), but football (rest of the world).
Some of the games of the 2026 world championship will be played in the stadium. And they are planning to re-design a large part of the interior until then.
In a lower level of the building, at playing field level, are the facilities to prepare and maintain the playing surface (at least when there aren't RVs parked in the hall).
Mostly there are rooms with equipment, but some banners from previous events (obviously including some monster truck show) are stored there for decoration.
The level also contains the room where they do the post-game press conferences.
And, of course, the locker rooms for the Dallas Cowboy players and the cheerleaders.
Not surprisingly, the locker room for the cheerleaders is a bit brighter and has more lights and mirrors than the players have.
But otherwise, and I found that surprising, the locker rooms look mostly identical.
I would have expected, for example, individual make-up tables for the cheerleaders. (There a couple of those in a side room, but not that many.)
Another unexpected thing was the Stadium Club room. There's a fairly posh club room, with a lot of original art in it, almost hidden away in a side of the stadium. I was a bit surprised that the best place in the building didn't have any views of the playing field (or of the outside world). But it kind of makes sense. On game days, it's only open to season ticket holders and it allows them to relax and network before and after the game. But even for season ticket holders for suites, there would be the temptation to leave the suite and go into the club and watch the game from there. So I assume it's intentional that you the room doesn't have any direct view. Only lots of TV coverage.
It does look a lot nicer and more modern than the current suites, though.
There aren't any pictures from the other activities that day.
I drove to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to see dollars being printed. There are only two places in the USA where paper money is made, with the other one being in Washington, D.C.
But they don't allow photographs in there.
It turns out that printing money looks dull.
While the actual printing process is different (they make a big point that most of the printing on the money is intaglio printing), it doesn't look much different from the offset printing of a newspaper (and it's less likely that someone will shout "stop the presses!"). And there's not much of the process visible from the viewing gallery.
You see stacks of paper going into a machine and then stacks of paper (or, later, plastic wrapped bundles) coming out.
I visited the UK Royal Mint in Cardiff the previous year. The do only coins (no banknotes) and there's also not that much to see of the process itself. But at least the coins coming out of the machine and falling in large bins look somewhat random. A bit like a large slot machine with a winning streak that lasts forever.
But with bank notes, it's an orderly and mostly automatic process. Not much to see and slightly boring.
Also, the money they sell in their gift shop is surprisingly expensive.
Money is printed with 32 notes (or 50 notes) on one sheet. It is then cut into individual notes.
But 'at the source' (i.e., the Bureau of Engraving and Printing) you can also buy uncut sheets. (Or partly cut sheets of four or eight notes.)
They are mostly for framing. While it might seem a fun thing to go to a shop and then cut out the money needed to pay the bill, the shop will probably not believe that this is real money and not accept it.
And even though it is technically 'legal tender', there's no obligation that any shop has to accept it. Which means that, most likely, you will have to pay the bill some other way and be stuck with (probably) badly cut bills. Which most people or machines won't accept either. In the end, you will have to exchange them at a bank for more regular cut currency. A lot of effort for a feeble joke.
But putting an uncut sheet framed on the wall? Why not?
Because you're paying a lot for that.
I had assumed that they would sell such uncut sheets at face value (after all, a sheet of 32 one dollar notes is worth 32 dollars). And they are the ones producing them right there. It's not a novelty item that needs to be specifically made, like, for example, a sheet with a hundred notes on it.
Also, as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is a government institution, they aren't supposed to be a for-profit organization (though maybe the gift shop is).
Anyway, a full sheet of $2 notes (nominally worth $64) goes for $102. And an eight-note sheet of $2 notes is $36 (instead of $16). More than double the nominal price. Of course, I didn't expect any kind of volume discount - that's not how money works - but I didn't think that not cutting money would turn out to be that expensive.
And it's not even a fixed cost. I would have accepted (but not really understood) if they had added a fixed cost to cover the effort of taking a sheet out of the machine before cutting. And, more costly, all the administrative work related to that, as some security system would note that less money came out of the bill cutting machine than expected. That likely means that a dozen forms need to be filled to confirm that, yes, that was intentional, and the money will be allowed to go into circulation.
But, for example, an eight-note sheet of $10 notes goes for $127 (that's $47 above face value), while an eight note sheet of $100 notes goes for $950 (so that's a premium of $150 for not cutting a sheet of paper...)
I found that rather strange.
On the way back from the money presses at Fort Worth to the hotel in Dallas, I stopped about halfway (not far from the AT&T Stadium, actually) to go karting.
No pictures here either.
And not that much to tell.
There wasn't any real reason to go karting, except it happened to be on the route. And, after driving roughly a thousand kilometers on Texas highways, it felt like it was time to drive somewhere with curves again.
The kart track was a bit strange. For one thing, they had electric karts, where they could throttle the available power remotely. Every time there was a 'yellow flag' condition somewhere along the track, they would limit the karts to crawl speed.
While that is, in theory, better than the track in Cardiff, where most drivers ignored the 'walking speed on yellow' rule and, at best, went 'not-quite-full-throttle', they didn't have any obvious yellow lights or flags. So, at various points, the kart suddenly slowed down without warning. And, more annoying, there was no clear indication when they would speed up again. Which made finding a good line difficult. In karting, it's usually better to take a wide line (staying too close to the inside of a corner makes you lose more speed than the shorter route makes it worth), but at a slow speed, the shorter distance is an advantage So you have a nice line, are almost able to go around a car that's too far inside. And then it's suddenly crawl speed and the other kart slowly tracks around the corner, while the own kart is on the far side.
The more irritating thing is that the track isn't wide enough.
Usually, there's at least a start/finish line that's wide enough to overtake another kart if you're on a better line through the last corner.
But that track never had a width of three karts.
If the kart of you is driving in the middle of the track, there isn't enough space on either side to pass. You're stuck in behind a slow kart forever.
Which doesn't actually matter, but I didn't know that.
For their rating, they use the best lap time during a (maximum) twelve lap race. So it's not important to overtake another kart. Actually, it's best to leave a gap that is as large as possible, to allow for an undisturbed fast lap.
So, essentially I did it all wrong, trying to get close to the kart in front of me and hope for some massive mistake that would have allowed me to pass it. But I felt a bit smug about having gotten the best lap time anyway.
(I went for a second run and ended up third, as I got stuck behind another kart and didn't know that the point wasn't to get a better position. But I was about a second faster on that second run. And my average time over twelve laps was lower than my best time on the first run. But that was mostly due better competition on the second run, so there weren't any yellow flags.)
Anyway, nothing important (except for giving me a minor chance to brag - but to put it into perspective - a good time on that track is under 20 seconds, so I wasn't even remotely close to that - it's simply that the other people who were at the track at the same time weren't good either), but it passed some time.
As my flight next day was in in the afternoon, I had a bit of time between checking out of the hotel and having to drive to the airport.
I did put in a short visit to the Dallas Museum of Art.
I went there mostly because it wasn't far from the hotel and where my rental car was parked. And I didn't have that much time to spend either, as I needed to catch a plane. But the collection was a surprising mix (in retrospect, it might have been a hint that it's not called the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of American Art or the Museum of Fine Arts, but simply the Dallas Museum of Art) and it would have been worth staying longer than the hour that I had available. Maybe I should have gone there instead of the aquarium two days earlier.
Anyway, the main reason for the trip was watching the eclipse (which I did). Everything else was 'icing on the cake'. No point in grumbling that there wasn't enough icing or that it wasn't sweet enough.