When weather conditions started to turn around in Belgium at the end of last year, it didn’t take me long to confirm a short trip to Texas. I had never been to Dallas and most of my knowledge about the city was based on the 80′s television series. So when I landed in Dallas and spotted my first cowboy hat, I couldn’t help myself but smiling. I had arrived in the South, yes mam! Home of Wrangler-jeans, oil, religion and uber-machoism (really had the impression most people have been influenced to YMCA’s seventies hit Macho Man). To give you an idea of that overall feeling: at the rental service, the smallest car available was a Dodge Challenger or a Mustang. On the other hand, they did have a wide range of pickup trucks, SUV’s,… “Sorry sir, you just don’t drive around in a small car in the South!”

Heading for Longview, Texas I must say I was not really impressed with the drive through Dallas-City itself. It had no real appeal to me as such and felt like typical grey business-city, which in this case gets its wealth mainly out of oil. Nothing more, nothing less. Luckily, the colour grey was slowly but surely exchanged for other colours. Brown, black cattle, white fences, white farms, green land,…

At one point I found myself driving through 100% uncut farmland. Acres and acres of nothing but farmland. Hours passed by, the travelling fatigue kicked inn, switched positions in the car and fell asleep. All of a sudden I woke up and “ding, did I just see a huge burning cross on a hill?” I was like “huh, can this be for real?” As my contact continued driving and darkness of the night had settled in, it left me kinda puzzled. The day after, we drove back to Dallas using the same highway and stopped at that same point again where I had spotted that burning cross. It was indeed a big cross on top of a hill and was used as a sign to lead the way to the entrance of a small church building behind it. Just to say that I don’t think I had ever seen an area with such a high density of churches, small, big, pink, white, old, new,…

Anyway, time passed by and we finally arrived in Longview, countryside boys & girls. And more importantly, real cowboys and cowgirls. In all my conversations I had over there, people could not stress enough their pride of being a true cowboy. “Dallas is for sissies and fashion lovers, son, real men stay at the countryside.” Needless to say that the cars over here were even bigger and wider than in Dallas City, instead of 4 tires they had pickups running 6 tires. Kyoto must have been nothing more than a brand of toiletpaper over here. Most SUV’s also had a gun rack at the back with corresponding riffles. “Here we shoot first, than we get to the question-part, if we get there…(grin)”.

“Jay, if you want to have good Italian over here, keep on trucking boy, but if you want to have steak, this is the best area in the world to have it”. Steak and BBQ-ed food. So I ended up having lunch at a BBQ-joint in Longview. Nothing too fancy, but great smoked meat, and off course, a rack to store your heads and guns. Crazy crackers. Next to the restaurant I noticed a Cavender’s Boot City. Boy, when i entered there, dudes were running probably the largest selection of cowboy boots I had seen in one place. Who needs kicks, when you got boots, right?

Returning to the airport of Dallas, we lost track so we stopped to ask for directions. A girl gave us some driving directions, but we got even more lost. So we stopped again. This time at a hunting store. This store was like huge, you could easily compare it to a big Carrefour building over here, but stacked entirely with hunting gear (boats, guns, semi-army vehicles, quads, you could not imagine what you could find there, absurd). We walked up to the concierge, my contact explained him where we needed to be and that he got instructions from a girl. He ended his conversation with the words ‘I should probably go back and beat her”, Yeah, you should do that, the concierge said, but if you do, put a phonebook in between her face and your fist, it avoids traces…” Once on the plane I couldn’t resist switching my Ipod to Neil Young’s song “Southern Man”.