From Roswell to Dallas 
, and the scene of the assassination of John F. Kennedy 
, we’ve covered two of America’s biggest conspiracy theories in two days.
We arrived in Texas last night and so far it’s fulfilling every stereotype I had of it. The landscape on the drive towards Dallas is littered with “nodding donkeys” (oil pumps) and you can actually smell oil in the air as you drive past the oil fields. There are also plenty of billboards advertising gun shows in Dallas and Fort Worth.
We visited the sixth floor museum 
today, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository , where Lee Harvey Oswald sat when he shot the president on November 22, 1963.
I’ll be the first to admit I knew very little about the assassination until today and I knew very little about JFK, but that possibly made it even more interesting. Because of the nature of the event the museum doesn’t contain any physical artefacts or exhibits, just newspaper clippings and photographs presented with an audio tour which told the story perfectly. The tour was comprehensive and covered the history of the man himself, the lead up to the event, a timeline of the day, the aftermath and the subsequent conspiracy theories. The highlight was visiting the corner of the floor and the window (still propped open) when Oswald hid.
Although the audio tour and the photos and clippings were great, I think what made the experience so special was being able to look out of the windows on the sixth floor and see exactly what Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen that day. We took a walk up on to the grassy knoll , where conspiracy theorists think more shots were fired from and looked towards the spot where the shooting happened. Then we drove our car down the route his motorcade took, right over the spot in the middle lane of Elm St. where he was shot. What was interesting is just how close the shooting, book depository and grassy knoll are together, a triangle not more than 100 yards wide.
It may have just been the bias of those who curated the museum and it’s unusual to feel sorry for politicians, but I left with the feeling that JFK was one of the good guys who still had a lot to offer when he was shot down. He’d  been president for just over 1000 days but in that time he made a promise to send a man to the moon within 10 years and diverted billions of dollars into the space race. He also diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis , forcing the Russians to back down and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty . He created the Peace Corps and was a big supporter of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement , introducing the Civil Rights Act which was passed after his death in 1964. I may be wrong, but it makes you wonder what he might have done if he’d have served longer.
Anyway I’m rambling. We’re off to Memphis tomorrow and we’re keeping an eye on the news because there’s a big hurricane heading towards the east coast. It’ll be long gone by the time we get there but I hope it doesn’t leave too much destruction behind.
P.S – Not many photos today I’m afraid as the museum has a photography ban inside…