More on our trip to Fort Worth.
The next morning (Wednesday, April 20, 2022), we got up a little late. We realized we had missed the complimentary hotel breakfast, so we figured it was a good chance to try another local restaurant. We decided on a trip to Yolk, a breakfast and lunch spot in Sundance Square.
It turns out that Yolk is a chain. There are quite a few Yolks scattered about the country. (Which sounds like a joke. Something about the Yolk’s on you. Okay, I didn’t say it was a *good* joke.)
Anyway, we drove back to Sundance Square and, after a shortish walk, we got a table and had breakfast. I had a quite nice fried egg sandwich on a bagel, and Martha had avocado toast. Not bad. Maybe a little pricey, but, still, not bad.
A Selfie Plus
Then we had to decide what to do. Martha was eager to visit a bookstore. A *real* bookstore. (Isn’t it alarming how rare those have become?) And, she’d found one that appealed to her – Barber Bookstore at 901 Throckmorton (website https://barbersbookstore.com/). The problem was that it was a ways away. I started to get up and go fetch the car. I figured I’d pick up Martha at the restaurant and then we could drive over to the store.
“No,” she said. “The parking here is terrible, and it isn’t *that* far. Let’s just walk.” I shuddered, but she was certain she could do it. So, after a bit, and following directions from Apple maps on our iphones, we finally arrived at the store.
It was a remarkable place – smallish, but dense with books, almost all of them used, covering almost every topic. There were several rooms of them, plus more in an upstairs loft-area. We browsed for quite some time.
I gather Barber’s is a rather storied place (no pun intended). It turns out that it is almost a hundred years old (founded 1925), and has had a variety of colorful owners and operators. Here’s a fun story about the place by Malcolm Mayhew:
Anyway, we looked about. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much fiction on view. Or, at least, we didn’t find it. Perhaps we just didn’t know where to look. In the end, Martha got an exotic cookbook, I got Peter Watson’s _The Caravaggio Conspiracy,_ the true story of how Watson and a number of art world insiders worked to discover the location of certain stolen masterworks in the 1980s. Hey. It gives me a chance to pretend that I, too, am a witty and wealthy investigative journalist with connections in high places all over Europe. They don’t call me Walter Mitty Jr. for nothing.
Okay, nobody really calls me that. But, you get the point. And if you don’t, you haven’t read Thurber. In which case, I can’t help you. I mean, *really.*
We walked part of the way back to the car, but by then Martha was tiring, and it was getting hot. So, we found a Starbucks in Sundance Square and got iced Americanos. Then, she sat at one of the tables under the big mushroom things and I went and got the car. I picked her up and we headed back to the hotel for a bit of rest.
The “bit of rest” turned out to be most of the rest of the day. Simply put, Martha had begun to feel the effects of the walk (she did over a mile!) and the heat. So, we decided to forgo more adventures until the morning. Instead, we got wine, bread, and cheese at a local grocery, and crashed at the hotel. This is, by the way, sort of a tradition for us. When we travel, we usually have one night when we just eat in, and watch TV.
Well, not exactly TV. Because, you see, for the last few years, we haven’t been able to figure out how to work the TVs in hotel rooms. There is always some trick to getting the dang things to turn on, or off, or to get to the channels, and we don’t know it. And, of course, we always forget to bring our Netflix password. So…
Almost inevitably, we end up whipping out our laptops, linking to the hotel Wifi, and watching our shows on them instead.
That night, it was Inspector Lewis and the unflappable Sergeant Hathaway, solving the murder and mutilation of the partly detestable but mostly pathetic Oswald Cooper…
All of that, with Italian bread, local butter, and a mozzarella, prosciutto and basil roll, and washed down with a very nice Pinot Grigio.
Not a bad way of spending the evening.
More to come.
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About the photo: once again, nothing to do with the story, but I thought it was a nice shot. This is actually a selfie + Martha I took on my birthday back in February when we went out to dinner. It was a pleasant time that made for a lovely memory.
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