August 5, 2000: Fred's Birthday
June 29 - July 4, 2000: Our Summer Trip: North Carolina
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July 12, 2000
A Visit to the Dallas Arboretum
 

Today we are going to go over to the Dallas Arboretum with a good friend of ours, Lou Acevedo. We have known Lou for some time, and to things like this trip to the gardens, as well as movies and stuff, with him. We met at my house to have lunch, and then headed over to the Arboretum.

 

Getting to the Dallas Arboretum


The Dallas Arboretum is not too far from where I live over on Inwood- I'd guess about six or seven miles as the crow flies (see the map opposite)- but you can't get there as the crow flies because White Rock Lake is in the way. So you can either go through town and wind your way around the south end of the lake or you can take Mockingbird over around the north side of the lake. Today, we just took Mockingbird over to Buckner Boulevard to Garland Road and the Arboretum.


In this closer view, you can see the south end of White Rock Lake and you can pick out the bike trail that hugs the lake shore almost all the way around. At the south end is White Rock Lake Dam and spillway, which takes the overflow water and sends it under Garland Road to continue on down to the Trinity River.

The bike path used to cross the top of the dam, but for one reason or another, the bike path was rerouted a year ago, and now it goes through some parkland and playing fields south of the dam, across the spillway, up Garland Road for a ways, and then back north along the lake shore.

You can also see a closer view of the Arboretum in this picture, and can begin to pick out some of the pathways through the gardens.


Finally, in this close-up of the Arboretum itself, you can see most of the major features- including the parking area just off Garland Road, the new administrative buildings, the restaurant and gift shop (all right near the parking lot) and, off in the middle of the gardens, the DeGolyer house (the former residence of the family that donated the land for the Arboretum to the Arboretum Society.

You can also see the maze of pathways that criss-cross the gardens.

Today wasn't a particularly long visit; we tend to time our longer visits with Dallas Blooms!, the spring festival in the gardens when just about everything is in bloom, or the Fall Festival, which occurs beginning in October, and features the Pumpkin Patch. Because this was a short visit, and since there was no exhibition going, I haven't bothered to mark our path through the gardens or anything like that; we'll just take a look at some of the pictures we took.

We did wander through the whole garden (slowly, because it was quite warm), stopping at the Women's Garden, the fountain in front of the Camp House, and the Frog Fountain at one end of the Crepe Myrtle Allee. Below are clickable thumbnails for the pictures that we took on our visit to the gardens this afternoon:

 

We spent an enjoyable few hours walking around the Arboretum; it is one of our favorite weekend outings.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

August 5, 2000: Fred's Birthday
June 29 - July 4, 2000: Our Summer Trip: North Carolina
Return to the Index for 2000