Intelligent Travel

Deep-Fried Jelly Beans? Only in Texas

As a Texas native, I always look forward to this time of year, not because of fall foliage and temperatures that hover somewhere between brisk and perfection—autumn is somewhat of an abstract concept in Texas—but because this is Texas State Fair season.   

I’ve never been to any other state fairs, but I have a hunch that Texas’ annual celebration in Dallas is one-of-a-kind.

First of all, as you walk into the 277-acre Fair Park complex, you are greeted by a 54-foot-tall cowboy, lanky and smiling as he calls out “Howdy folks” over and over. His name is Big Tex, and he has been a Texas State Fair icon since 1952. In his former life, he was the world’s tallest Santa Claus, but these days he wears mostly denim and pearl-snaps, custom fit by a team of eight seamstresses.

This year, Big Tex is joined on the fairgrounds by a 25-foot statue of the Egyptian god Anubis (left). The jackal-headed statue is there to promote National Geographic's latest King Tutankhamun exhibit, "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," which will be showing at the Dallas Museum of Art through May 17, 2009. (There's no word yet as to how Big Tex feels about sharing the spotlight with his Egyptian friend.)   

But after you pass the odd duo and head deeper into the fairgrounds, the fun really begins. Choosing between concerts, craft booths, daredevil stunt shows, and pig races (yes, pig races) can be difficult, but choosing what to eat is even harder.

Which brings me to the most mind-boggling thing about the Texas State Fair—the food.

While many state fairs boast an array of standard, fairground junk food such as corn-dogs (Texas's own Fletcher’s corny dogs are hand-dipped right in front of you) and funnel cakes, the Texas State Fair takes this to a whole new level. Texans just are not satisfied with ordinary fried foods, which is why each year, there is some strange, new, fried creation that astounds North Texas and everyone else who hears about it.

Saving Oklahoma's Prairie Cathedral

Driving along Highway 177 in north-central Oklahoma, your eyes wander across seemingly endless stretches of open prairie and sky. So it may come as a surprise when they fall upon an oversized barn made of rock. You can perceive the outline of this local landmark miles before you actually confront it; and when you finally do, you’re met with walls 55 feet high, expertly cut and mortised of local sandstone, with two of the stones cut in heart and diamond shapes—more the makings of a cathedral than a barn. The space inside the barn is lofty—capable of holding up to 60,000 bales of hay—with pine and hemlock-fir trusses that make up its intricate, arching skeleton.  It's the largest free-standing rock barn in the state, and possibly the world.

Deconstructed, the barn contains enough lumber to stretch for 9 miles, and enough stone to build some authentic looking mountain cabins. These facts did not go unnoticed by the barn’s owners, who saw more profit in knocking it down than letting it remain on the 66.8 acres of grassland it had stood on since 1941, when it was built by a banker named Richard Schultz. Unless, of course, there was a way they could make a profit by selling it.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

So, one wouldn’t exactly call anywhere in Texas during the month of August “paradise,” but the greasy, cheeseburger goodness I enjoyed in the East Texas town of Mt. Pleasant had me humming Jimmy Buffet all the same.

When my boyfriend and I pulled up to the small metal building that is Randy’s Burgers a few weeks ago, our stomachs were growling. I had flown in to Dallas right around noon, but we decided to bypass the downtown lunch scene in favor of this wonderful small-town burger joint.

And let me tell you, after three hours in the car, a greasy brown paper sack never looked so good.

Greening Las Vegas

Las Vegas is the last place you’d ever expect to go green. A dizzying buffet of high-rise hotels, boisterous tourists, casinos, clubs, and lights flashing all around, the city of sin is hardly a picture of eco-friendliness.

The CityCenter—the newest addition to the Strip—promises to change this, however. A 76-acre city-within-a-city, the CityCenter will house hotels and residences, restaurants, and a $40 million public fine art program. Currently under construction and scheduled to open its centerpiece building, Aria, by the end of 2009, the CityCenter is destined to be one of the world’s largest environmentally sustainable urban communities. Inhabitat reports that the CityCenter is the largest privately financed development in the history of North America vying for U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) LEED certification. Indeed, the Center is slated to span 18 million square feet, which Inhabitat says is more square footage than all of the existing LEED-certified buildings combined.

The Center is the product of an $8-billion venture between MGM Mirage and Dubai World, and the goal is to make the process as green as possible. The project's developers have enlisted hundreds of consultants to ensure a sustainable approach to the project, and the MGM Mirage has educated over 10,000 construction workers and craftsmen on green building techniques. Other green bullet points include recycling construction waste, employing eco-sustainable materials, emphasizing natural lighting throughout, and incorporating materials from the imploded Boardwalk Hotel, which once stood where the CityCenter soon will. Also noteworthy is the MGM Mirage’s implementation of custom designed low-flow water fixtures, which will help save some 76 millions gallons of water per day.

Having recently returned from a long weekend in Vegas, which I enjoyed (I’ll even go so far as to say a bit too much) but nonetheless came out of feeling overwhelmed by the overbuilt indulgence of it all, part of me cringes at the thought of seeing yet another set of oversized buildings pierce the skyline. But then I'm reminded that if the CityCenter weren’t being built, chances are that some other building would be going up in its place, and that building wouldn’t necessarily have green in mind. So I look forward to seeing what this venture brings to Vegas and can only hope that all future projects will follow its, um, LEED.

Read More: Explore one of Vegas's hidden eco-hotspots.

Photo: CityCenter

Subscribe to this blog's feed

Terrestrial Beings to Resort to Extremes

The Roswell UFO Festival has just ended, but that doesn't mean extraterrestrial-themed fun has to stop. Architect/designer Gene Frazier and businessman Thomas Armstrong are out to prove that indulging your inner exphile can be a year-round pleasure.

The pair have been working on Earth Station Roswell, a resort complex nestled in the famous city where a UFO allegedly crashed in 1947. Breaking the bank at $50 million, the saucer-shaped complex, scheduled to open in the summer of 2010, will feature a hotel and conference center with numerous attractions, including a nightly light show, a spa, an all-virtual-reality arcade, extensive grounds, and a UFO theme strong enough to make anyone want to believe.

"We really want this to be the touchstone for information about UFOs, extraterrestrials, crop circles, lost civilizations," says Armstrong, on the phone from his retail store Roswell Landing. "We want it to be the place where people can find out what’s going on in the world with these things—the latest archaeology, the latest research, the latest information."

Being pigeonholed as a tourist attraction may seem inevitable (that's what happens when you build a 75-foot-tall, 300-room hotel shaped like a spaceship), but Armstrong is passionate about the complex being a classy locus of knowledge and information.

Las Vegas Goes Au Naturel

In the neon haze of Las Vegas’s infamous Strip, it’s easy to forget the reason for the Capital of Excess’s birth (hint: it has nothing to do with blackjack or free margaritas). An oasis amid an expanse of barren desert, Vegas was once home to natural bubbling springs that sustained the area’s Native Americans, vagabonds traveling on the Old Spanish Trail, and Mormons settling the region.

Just three miles west of downtown—and seemingly worlds away from the “what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas” crowd—sits the Springs Preserve, a 180-acre spot of land on the site of the original oasis that offers a decidedly more authentic take on the Vegas experience.

The part-indoors, part-outdoors cultural and historical park made its debut last June and has since been likened to New York’s Central Park, with eight acres of colorful botanical gardens, four nature trails, restored wetlands, live desert wildlife exhibits, a kid’s play zone, a 2,000-seat amphitheater, and, perhaps most significantly, nary a casino.

We Can't Make this Sh*t Up

Friend of IT Amanda Jack lived in Austin, Texas, for several years, and she recalls her favorite saloon's Sunday afternoon chicken show. (Shouldn't all saloons have a Sunday afternoon chicken show? We think so.)

A true measure of any sustainable establishment is how well it uses its recycled waste. Every Sunday afternoon at Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon (North Burnet Rd.) in Austin, Texas, the savvy visitor will find the bar in the throes of a sustainable celebration. Of course, it's not quite in the way one might expect.

At Ginny's, a long time Austin establishment (its motto: No Fussin', No Cussin', No Hasslin', No Wrasslin') far from the frat packs of the popular 6th Street, small monuments of fowl feces (pun intended) are found plopping their way onto a large grid covering a wooden board set on the pool table. Cheering the chicken on as it lays a less celebrated specimen are hoards of regulars and instantly hooked first-timers clutching a number that just may be the lucky square chosen for defecation target practice.

Ginny's Sunday standard, Chicken Shit Bingo, has branded itself into the hearts of a faithful following and is not to be missed if you are in town. Participants hope to turn their $2 into $100 via this popular crap shoot, and the crowd spills out into the parking lot as a surprisingly calm chicken does her dooty for the mid-afternoon onlookers.  Most Sundays, local country legend Dale Watson serenades the winners and consoles the losers with his true country voice that makes you sway even if you've never seen the two-step.

While Sunday afternoons are a special treat, this tiny stalwart of an establishment will please any day of the week. Cowboys of all ages swing their partners in tight circles, expertly navigating tables and bar stools as more sedentary patrons stomp a foot in time while chugging down longnecks of $2 Lone Star beer. Once the Poultry Queen has expelled the last of her marker-pellets, continue the adventure by walking down Burnet Road to a smattering of thrift stores. And if the fecund fecal display hasn't turned you off it, grab some grub at the nearby Austin Diner, where the only chicken around is served as dinner.

Amanda Jack likes traveling and cheese, but not necessarily the cheese she finds while traveling.

Photo: Bingo at Ginny's, by Casey Moore via Flickr

Subscribe to this blog's feed

Utah's Prehistoric Rock Art Threatened

Just a few miles from the town of Price in central Utah lies Nine Mile Canyon, home to the greatest concentration of rock art in the United States, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Though there are few facilities, adventurous visitors can drive the 78-mile Nine Mile Canyon Back Country Byway to see the roughly 10,000 petroglyphs and pictographs carved by the Ute and Fremont Indians.

But the images, created at least one thousand years ago, have been endangered in the last several years by dust kicked up by industrial traffic related to the development of natural gas nearby. Recently, a proposal to add 800 more natural gas wells to the project would increase the traffic fourfold and was met with concern by the National Trust, the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, and other groups. The area has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, and the trust created this YouTube video to spread the word about the rock art's plight:

While pursuing natural gas (the cleanest-burning fossil fuel) is a worthy cause, it shouldn't come at the expense of a priceless collection of rock art. Canyon advocates hope that an alternate route can be agreed upon so that the integrity of this beautiful natural monument will be maintained.

Have you visited Nine Mile Canyon? What do you think?

Down by the River

Contributing Editor Andrew Nelson rounds out his week-long tour of San Antonio's Fiesta with the big shebang: the River Parade.

The ambulance chasers and personal injury lawyers must love the River Walk, San Antonio's spectacularly successful network of leafy, landscaped pathways lacing its river flowing through downtown.

Few barriers, rails or poles separate pedestrians from the river. Any one can fall in. And sometimes, after a few margaritas from the many restaurants clustered along its banks, they do. I've heard they retrieve a mountain of muddy cell phones from the depths each year when they drain and clean it.

It's really unique. My hotel room at the Riverwalk Vista, a 17-room inn housed in a 19th century grocer's building, frames the river with its huge, 8-foot-tall windows. I spent more than a few minutes gazing down below at the meandering crowds and the tourist barges passing by. It's better than movies-on-demand, with nothing added to your bill at checkout.

So I'm a little nervous when my friends and I arrive at a crowded private party to view the floats at the River Parade at San Antonio's Fiesta. We're part of the 250,000-strong crowd hanging off bridges and along the promenades hoping for a glimpse of a Texas Cavalier.

What's a Texas Cavalier?  (find out after the jump...)

Heavy Medal

Contributing Editor Andrew Nelson offers us a metaphor, or perhaps medalphor, for San Antonio's Fiesta...

Wandering San Antonio during Fiesta Week you'll encounter a lot of people whose jackets, baseball caps and sashes are emblazoned with dozens of brightly colored medals making them look like walk-ons from an opera set in a 19th century Spanish military academy.

Medals are to Fiesta what beads are to Mardis Gras - currency, status symbol and collector's items. They are bartered and sold – even auctioned. One on eBay, a 1941 version, is selling for more than $299.
Other people buy them at San Antonio's official Fiesta Store, but I can't seem to figure out where it is.

San Antonian Christa Emrick was doing Fiesta with a good three dozen hanging from her sash.

"Each group will make one," she says pointing to several. "I've got one from a military organization, an AIDS group, and a German group. You can even make your own," she said fingering an elaborate one set with greenish stones. "This is one I did." The San Antonio Express has a great roundup of all the different kinds.

It's one of the niftiest elements of Fiesta in that anyone can make something and join in the fun. Sure, there's a big social scene – I saw one "king" and his "court" of debutantes roll by in a police-escorted motorcade of gas-guzzling Cadillac Escalades. (No one in that kingdom got the memo about going Green, apparently.) Yet the official Fiesta appears much more accessible in its way than, say, the secret krewes of New Orleans with their exclusive balls, open only to a small group of rich families. That may be because San Antonio is optimistic about its future and remains vibrant economically. Dynamic cities tend to steamroll hidebound customs - but something changing as fast as San Antonio has a real need to keep traditions if only as an anchor in times of great change. So when they pin a medal on you at Fiesta, they're actually helping to pin down the past, securing it in a city that is speeding headlong into to the future.

For more information about Fiesta visit www.fiesta-sa.org. For visiting San Antonio head to www.visitsanantonio.com.

Photo: Andrew Nelson

Subscribe to this blog's feed