Leadership is in the eye of the beholder

I spent this morning at the Sixth Floor Museum, the scene of one of the more infamous moments in history, the assassination of John F Kennedy who, in November 1963, was gunned down from a window of the Texas School Book Repository building.

You can look out of the windows onto the actual road where the Presidential motorcade was driving when Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot Kennedy twice, once in the neck, the second in the head. It's a pretty good museum, and you get a feel for what Kennedy meant to the nation and to the world. On the other hand, it isn't as good a museum as the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, where you can stand in the very motel room where Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down. And that is a very good museum...

Dallas has a surprisingly lively downtown heart, with the Arts District, museums, a department store, restaurants and many of the other things we Europeans come to expect. I spent the rest of my day riding the McKinney Avenue Streetcar (rediscovered after thirty years by accident), drinking coffee and shopping. The streetcar line was apparently just concreted over when it wasn't needed any more, and it was only discovered that the tracks were still there during road building thirty years later. So, after a feasibility study, they rebuilt the tracks, bought four old trams, one of which comes from Melbourne, and reintroduced a tram service. It's one of the more unexpected facets of this city, and adds to the sense that Dallas is more than the cliches of oil, stetsons and brashness.

Tomorrow, sadly, it's time to come home. I've enjoyed Texas and New Mexico, and have good cause to come back. Maybe next year?...