Flying to Fort Worth…

Just before my mum left this side of the world for UK, my twin sister and I met up with her in Fort Worth as an easy place to meet between us, geographically speaking. Fort Worth is also well known for its art offerings, and as we all like a bit of culture every now and then, this was a perfect spot.

So, Fort Worth is known to be a cowboy-town as its history revolves around that. It started in the late 1800’s as an Army outpost on a bluff overlooking the river, and then evolved into one of the main stops on the cattle drive trail via train to leave (and enter) Texas. It’s right next to Dallas, so for many people, Fort Worth gets all swallowed up in one vast metroplex, but the two cities seem to have different feels to me.

So, we stayed in Fort Worth, right in the Cultural District, and we all had so many laughs – it was so fun. Culturally speaking, we visited the Kimbell Art Museum  which was FABULOUS. I don’t know why more people don’t talk about this place as it was very very well done plus it was designed by famous American architect Louis I. Kahn (which was also a nice touch especially as I have a slight craze on that field at the moment). I’d done some research before the visit so I could astonish my family with such intriguing nuggets as “look at the vaults – Kahn liked Roman structure” and similar. 🙂

The art collection was fabbo. (Technical term for you.) It’s not a huge collection, but it’s curated extremely well and so they have some excellent pieces there. This was one of my favs:

Sorry – not sure who the artist is here… Any ideas?

But there were loads of others as well. The descriptions beside each of the pictures got to be pretty funny after a while — once we’d read the 20^th over-earnest art statement about it, they started to seem to be a bit ridiculous and stretching to make a point. (It’s a picture for crying out loud.) However, it was fun,  it was culture, and the building was superb to see the art. (All natural light.)

Oh, and in the museum gift shop, I happened to find a book written by my favorite uncle Peter Inskip who is an expert in renovating historical architecture and works with Yale University on some projects. How about that? “I see famous relatives…”

And here’s my lovely Uncle Peter on the spine of a book that he co-wrote…

So once we’d finished there and had a nice lunch, we went driving around and found a Target (as is our family wont) and then really just messed around for the rest of the day. (Loads of laughs too.) The next day was sunny and pretty and we spent the morning walking around the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens which were just plain lovely to see. As it had just rained the day before, everything was very green and lush which was beautiful to see plus my sis, mum and I were just casually chatting about anything and everything. Nice combination of things to do.

So – a lovely weekend with the fam…