My travel story: Texas, Day 1 - Rodeo at Fort Worth

Dear Hive friends,

Wow, it has been a while since my last stop in Haveyoubeenhere community! They even change the name of it to Pinmapple in between. Well, I often stop by at this community as a curator, since I see it as the one with most quality content especially considering number of posts shared. So looking through my traveller eyes Pinmapple is definitely a place to stop while browsing through Hive.

Most of you already know a few things about my recent travel, as I was sharing some photos and short write ups from the destination already. I also announced new travel series which will cover my trip more detailed and I am sure you will find many interesting things, especially if you maybe consider visiting Dallas or state of Texas. On the other hand, there will be quite a few photos which I consider nice shared along the way.

Where should we begin? Probably at the beginning, right 😊?
At the beginning of January, me and my father started talking about possible travelling to Dallas in March 2022. At first it was more like a joke since Covid was still very much present and I have a young kids at home and also financial status was questionable at that time. Our main goal was to see few games of Dallas Mavericks where Slovenian star Luka Dončič is playing. I read at local news that there will be Slovenian night organised for the game against Sacramento Kings on March 5th. Since we were already on that kind of Slovenian night in Miami when Dončič played against Dragič in his first NBA season back in 2019 and it was a truly unforgettable experience so we said it would be awesome to do that again. Neither of us was in Texas, so that was another plus for the travel. I looked at schedule of games of Dallas and there was a four games homestand just in that time at the beginning of March for Dallas, meaning we could do most of them if we plan well. So there definitely was a lot of interest on our side, now other things had to fulfil. First was financial and as I didn’t want to spend any family money, only way for me was to pay for the travel from my alternative income – HIVE. Well not directly, but indirectly… I am an NBA Top Shot collector for more than a year and invested quite a lot of Hive in it. NBA Top Shot is an NFT project where you collect moments as best NBA plays. As a huge sports fan that is very interesting for me and it could also be very profitable. The peek was with massive pump back in February 2021 when I joined, but it was an interesting ride all the time from then on. Well to cut to the chase, we said if my account valuation at NBA Top Shot get to 20.000 dollars we will book a travel and go there. I didn’t completely believe in that since my valuation just hit 10k at the beginning of December and in January while we were speaking about this it was at 15.000 dollar, which was a great growth but I somehow didn’t believe that it will reach 20k. But it did, on January 18th and now a word is a word. My wife said no problem, that I can go and that she will take care for the kids for the time of the travel with pleasure. Hat off to her, as I doubt I would manage to do that. Also at the time of my decision I didn’t clearly think about how much I will miss them all while I will be traveling as that was our first goodbye for more than a day. O return to my account valuation with a few words before moving on. It raised all the way to 23k, but last month was very bad and it came down to around 16.000 dollars. I still have to sell some to pay my travel debts to my father.
Well planning started way before our confirmation “financial” confirmation as this is one of the best parts of the travel. I like to plan everything in advance in details. We managed to grab a nice and economic flight tickets departing from hometown Ljubljana and arriving to Dallas in about 2 hours total travel time including stop in Frankfurt and for the return trip it was similar time, just that we had another stop planned in Chicago. At the time we bought tickets, we also decided to spend 10 days there and now I can finally start with day 1 of the travel actually. It was a long intro, but I thought it would be interesting to share you an inside of how it actually came to realisation of this travel and what was all behind and how did I look on it.

Day 1 started in Ljubljana as I already wrote and ended in Dallas a lot of hours later 😊
My flight was at 7 am and I was at the airport around half past 5 in the morning meaning wake up time was about an hour earlier. That will be important info to calculate total awake time that day. Flights went well and it is only my fault that I can not sleep on the airplanes. I had window seat and my father went few rows to the back, so we both had two seats available for ourselves, but I couldn’t sleep at all even though I used a medicine for sleeping. No way, I am not that kind of person so I wasn’t to shocked that I didn’t managed to fell asleep, since I never do. After landing at around 2 pm at Dallas Forth Worth airport. We get our luggage and deal with the boarder control relatively fast. We jump on a shuttle bus to the Rental Car Center about 10 minutes drive away where we had pre-reserved our vehicle. We choose some economic variant with Advantage rental car company if anybody knows them and we were surprised that there was nobody at their counter, while at least 30 people were waiting at Budget, etc. Everything went relatively smooth, just that we had to pay an extra liability insurance which we thought we had it cover with extra insurance we get from Expedia, and our biggest mistake of the travel and planning which happened at the very first moment and that was not knowing how does the highway works in vicinity of Dallas and through Texas. We knew we would be doing quite a lot of kilometres since we were planning to visit Houston, San Antonio,… but we didn’t know if there are toll roads or not. The salesperson convinced us that we need that “toll pass” for sure if we will be driving around a lot and we paid 13$ per day for that. Well we used it once for a couple of kilometres in Houston and the last day when we were returning the vehicle to the airport for a mile or two. Total rip off, but that was our fault since we didn’t do a self-inquiry while we were at home planning whole trip. But hey if all unluck is in those 150 bucks, let it be, right?
We get the only vehicle remaining at the parking lot from that company and it was a Toyota Corolla which served us well. It was decently equipped, but hey it didn’t have a central locking. I don’t know if I used the right expression, but you couldn’t lock or unlocked it from the distance with key. Do they really still do cars/keys like that?
We went directly to the hotel after picking up car and it was a bit of a rush hour already, but nothing serious. Traffic in Dallas isn’t that bad as in LA for example. This was the only time we stayed at one hotel for more than one night. At the beginning of our travel we stayed in Dallas for three night and afterwards we returned there for two more night. It was a decent hotel, or should I better use the word motel.
No time to rest for us, we went straight to Fort Worth which is know to be very interesting and that has a lot to offer. We had tickets for rodeo show that very first evening in US. We drove directly to the Cowtown Coliseum in historical part of Fort Worth and parked our car directly in front od the arena for which we paid a price and we didn’t park there anymore when we returned other days 😊
We had a little less than an hour until the start of the show. So we went to explore the surroundings a bit, but either way we planned to come back next day in the morning there again.
I didn’t know what to expect from rodeo. I watched some videos prior to my departure just to get an impression of how it looks, but could hardly say much about it. Well after attending one, or better say two since we went to another one in Houston later, but that was a different story for next episodes, I can say it is interesting and that I can feel it being part of the Texas tradition, but for me that is too cruel to the poor animals there. Sure I am a huge meat lover and I am not some kind of a “fighter for animal rights”, but damn, seeing these angry animals on one side and little calf or whatever they are called how they are almost running for their lives doesn’t make you comfortable. That bull and horse riders are crazy guys and some woman also. I am afraid of riding a horse not to jump from it on the top of the calf or even to be kicked down from it. It is hard to imagine how this “sport” looks like in person. It was scary at first time, but nobody got hurt so probably they know what they are doing.
Otherwise that was a semi final event for The American Rodeo which is happening every year at the beginning of March on At&T Stadium which is a home of Dallas Cowboys football team and more from it will be shared from my side in a couple of weeks in some of the last edition of this travel diary. That event is known to be one of the biggest and most popular in Western culture. Unfortunately I don’t know any of the performers, so I might even watched the winner of whole rodeo on that day and I don’t even know. I like that, I was able to be that close to the main stage, so I was able to do some photos. They are not perfect as those animals are moving so fast! It is still better than the rodeo at Houston where they hosted it as a main event on their football stadium and my tickets were all the way on the top, so there was a different kind of experience.

I was long today, so I promise to keep shorter in the next episodes. Photos are following below and I hope you will get an impression of how crazy that rodeo actually is.

Thank you all for your support in the past and looking forward as well. Have a great weekend!