Bug dip for mileage and to write the story of our visit to the Fort Worth Stockyards.
We have had a fun day today caching and benchmarking around the Stockyards. As a FW native, Mama Blaster has been coming to the stockyards for as long as she can remember. She can remember when it was still smelly around here. It took YEARS after the plants closed (the last one, Swift & Co., closed in 1971) for the smell of the meatpacking operations that went on for 70 years here to fade away completely. Now it is a fun, vibrant, and tourist-friendly (but still authentic) area. Mama Blaster and her Dad would come down here for buffalo burgers in the 1970s and 80s when that meat was still hard to find, and when the stockyards area was still pretty rough.
Today the entire Blaster family came and enjoyed the history and atmosphere of this unique area. Mama Blaster has brought the younger Blasterz here several times, but never with travel bugs. We had extra fun finding cool things to take pictures of with our travelers. We found a small cactus garden on the Stockyards hotel, which is now a very nice historic hotel but has a very long bordello history. The TBs all had their pictures made in the garden. Then it was out to the historic 1910 entry to the Stockyards, where the bugs got photographed with the historic marker. Next we headed down to the Coliseum, which is where the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show began. It is still in use. Bugs and YBlasterz had pictures made on one of the 2 historic cannons outside the Coliseum. Both cannon were pulled out of the San Antonio River. One is a Spanish gun, and the other is believed to have belonged to the Texians.
Finally we walked all the way to the end of Exchange Avenue, past the FW Livestock Exchange, and up the stairs to the offices of the Swift and Armour meatpacking plants that made this place an economic engine that gave Cowtown its name. At one time, this area (Niles City -- annexed by Fort Worth in the 1920s) was the richest little city in the WORLD. More stockyards history can be found in the Handbook of Texas Online.
We dropped one bug off in a cache here, and the rest are coming back to Garland with us.