Tragedy plus time equals summer vacation destinations

We hatch this vacation as a life-embracing pilgrimage deep into the heart of the best part of Texas. My brother, Bill, who has swallowed up food and music and culture from every corner of our nation, says Austin is the place you go to feel good. Nothing makes a man feel happier to be alive than a table at The Broken Spoke when Dale Watson and his band are playing music, Bill says.

So we load up the Prius and drive to Austin. Since it's a 1,128-mile drive from my house to The Broken Spoke, Bill and I decide to break up the drive by spending the night in Oklahoma City.

That's where our trek takes a detour into the macabre, a personal stopover in Tragedyville. Not our personal tragedies (the worst thing that happened on the trip is we ran out of gas in Oklahoma and had to sit in the shade until AAA showed up with fuel). The tragedies on our trip are tourist spots.

We throw a couple of quarters into a parking meter and mosey over to the Outdoor Symbolic Memorial on the grounds of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

There is a solemn beauty to the Field of Empty Chairs, where the 168 bronze seats resting upon glass bases represent each of the men, women and children killed on April 19, 1995, when a bomb leveled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. A 200-foot chain-link face along one side holds letters, photographs, stuffed animals, T-shirts and other memorabilia that still connects the living to those killed that day. More than 60,000 items have been left by the more than 4.4 million tourists who have visited the Field of Empty Chairs.

That's not nearly as many as have made the journey to our next stop in Dallas, to see where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I take a photo as Bill stands on the X marking the spot in the road where the first shot ripped through Kennedy's throat.

From there, we go to the University of Texas in Austin to gaze upon the tower where a gunman with a rifle killed 14 people and wounded 32 others in 1966 in what was the worst school shooting until the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The university doesn't make that tragedy a part of the tower's appeal as a tourist spot.

Neither does Waco make a big deal out of the Branch Davidian tragedy of 1993, where 86 people died in a government siege that later fueled the Oklahoma City bombing. The Interstate exit for Waco is also the exit for Fort Hood, where a military psychiatrist opened fire and killed 13 people at the Army base there last November.

On our return trip, we don't have time to visit the Memphis hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered and a museum now sits, but lots of tourists do.

I drove out of my way to see JFK's spot in Dallas and the Ford Theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot, but I have never made an effort to see where James Garfield and William McKinley were shot.

The National Gallery of Art now occupies the spot where Garfield was shot in 1881 while waiting for a train at the Sixth Street rail station in Washington, D.C.

McKinley was shot in 1901 at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, NY. Built for the Pan-American exposition, the music hall was torn down after the expo. The Buffalo Historical Society put a bronze plaque on a rock at the site to let you know about McKinley.

McKinley was no Jack Kennedy, and Garfield wasn't even a William McKinley, so I guess that's why tourists don't clamor to see those spots.

My brother and I visit some tragic sites, intentionally skip a few and remain ignorant of others. We cruise close to the site of the Cherry coal mine disaster in Illinois, about 90 minutes southwest of St. Charles, where 259 miners, some as young as 10, died in 1909. But that's not a tourist hot spot.

I don't know why some tragedies become tourist spots and others don't. I do know that thinking about tragedies while on a pleasure trip can weigh on you.

And I also know that my brother, Bill, is right. No matter what is on your mind, sitting at a table at The Broken Spoke, where people leave cell phones and purses on the table to save their seats while they dance to Dale Watson and his band, does make you feel good.