It's interesting - the two first presidential sites we've visited, on our quest, are for Johnson and Johnson. And there are a number of parallels between the men; as often as I've heard the comparison between Lincoln's presidency and Kennedy's, I don't think I've ever heard the two Johnsons compared much.
The LBJ park is actually two separate areas, 14 miles apart. In Johnson City, there is the museum and the boyhood home. The museum is very nicely done, in what was once a hospital, with not one but two film showing regularly. The only thing I wish for was more on Lady Bird's life - but we didn't watch the second movie, focused on her, so I guess it's my own fault.
One reason we didn't watch the movie is that the tour of the boyhood home was starting. It's an interesting old home, which particularly helped me to understand how folks dealt with the Texas heat (nearly every room opened to the outside, so that a screen door could let a breeze through). The other striking feature was the small water tower in the backyard, which gave the Johnsons something resembling running water in the house.
We then proceeded to the ranch. The introduction movie was wonderful - it was film of Johnson showing a reporter around the ranch, which made for an ideal introduction. Well, save for the disappointment it caused that we didn't enter the ranch via the original "underwater road" entrance. There is a CD tour freely distributed (to be returned); we've had great luck with these (most recently in Acadia), so we took advantage of it. But because you have to loop around a landing strip, there's a lot of land with nothing much to talk about, so they added songs. The first I didn't recognize - an old Texas song, I believe - but the second was "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", which I suspect I'll now forever more associate with the LBJ Ranch (just as "We Are Family" instantly brings to mind the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates). Being a working ranch, we had to wait patiently on crossing cows a couple of times, and when we got back to the start of the loop discovered a cow who decided to stand guard over its entrance.
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