Today we decided to go into town and do some sightseeing. First stop the JFK museum which is on the 6th floor of the School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald was suspected of shooting the President. There are certainly a lot of conspiracy theories on Oswald, Ruby and others that may or may not have been involved in the shooting, which we found fascinating.
Timeline and facts for the interested: 12:30 JFK is shot, 12:36 JFK arrives at hospital (4 miles away), 1:00 JFK pronounced dead, 2pm JFK removed from hospital in a casket from O’Neal’s funeral home at a cost of $3,995 and weighed over 400 pounds (in fact the secret service took the body against local law enforcement direction and before a medical examination could be done, which was apparently illegal in Texas) and was driven to Air Force One. Interestingly the original casket was not what was used for the funeral and was kept by the funeral home that did the embalming for more than a year as they didn’t know what to do with it. In the meantime the O’Neal funeral home owner Vernon, was arguing with the U.S Government over the price tag of the coffin. The government felt it was excessive, but even after O’Neal lowered the price, the two sides remained at an impasse. What O’Neal really wanted however, was the coffin returned. He was getting offers for more than $100,000 for it -nearly 1 million today. The federal government, to prevent the casket from falling into the hands of the “morbidly curious”, paid O’Neal his $3,495, then turned it over to the U.S Air Force, who drilled holes in it, filled it with 80 pound sandbags and crated it before dropping it into the Atlantic Ocean 100 miles East of Washington D.C. President Kennedy, a Navy veteran of WWII, had once considered a burial at sea.
Here are some pics of the museum.
After the somber tour of the museum, we decided to go for a nice Mexican lunch! Included were a margarita and sangria….of course.
Next stop the Dallas World Aquarium!! Something happy and fun to end the day! I LOVE Aquariums, my fav is the Ridleys Aquarium in Toronto. If you have never been, I strongly suggest you go. So Barb and I enter the building and the entrance BEFORE you get to the ticket booth is amazing! There are all sorts of birds that you have to stop and take pictures of. This is something that I was surprised to see at an Aquarium, but what the heck. Here are the pics of the entrance
We then started our tour of the facility. I will say upfront we discovered that there were many layers/levels Orinoco Rainforest which included the Canopy, the Understory, and then the Aquatic. Then the Mundo Maya, lower level and upper level. While we FINALLY got to some aquariums, this really isn’t an aquarium tour, the tour through the canopy the jungle and the underwater world was outstanding. Here are some more pics to enjoy.
One can’t leave the blog without paying tribute to the Sloth. The Sloth is a sluggish tree-dweller of Central and South America and they spend their lives in the tropical rain forest moving through the canopy at a rate of about 40 yards per day, munching on leaves, twigs and buds. Sloths have an exceptionally low metabolic rate and spend 15 to 20 hours per day sleeping. While I am a FIRM believer of slowing down in life………….this is too slow. We watched the sloth today over the span of about 4 minutes taking a piece of bamboo (we think) from a handler. Patience is the KEY to working with these guys. Sorry the pics are not clearer, but the lighting was not ideal in this area. MB these are for you!!
