This is the version of itself that Texas wants to present to the country, a fun, lively oasis where NASA sends astronauts into space and people bury Cadillacs in the ground for the sheer spectacle of it.
There’s plenty that the state’s tourism officials missed. There are no blue bonnets or barbecue — save a brief flash of brisket in a video — no replicas of oil rigs or breakfast tacos.
Doug Latham, a South Carolinian who was stationed in Texas while serving in the Air Force, thought they’d done an okay job, except for one thing.
“The size of Texas. There’s no way you can comprehend that,” he said.
To be fair, there’s only so much you can say with a modest-sized room of identical dimensions to the 39 other states participating in the fair — 11 states declined Trump’s invitation.
Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for the Governor’s Economic Development and Tourism Office, which organized the booth, said the aim was to give visitors “a real taste of what makes our state exceptional.”
You can watch a video of musicians performing at the Austin City Limits music festival while checking out a scaled-down version of Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch before walking inside a replica of a NASA spacecraft.
And if you fancy entering a raffle for a free trip to Texas, there are tablets set up quizzing visitors about which soda was invented in Waco in 1885, “making it a full year older than Coca-Cola,” and which Texas city is known as the “boot capital of the world” and where Buddy Holly was born.
Then it’s back outside into the almost, but not quite Texas-level heat, a little revived, with a complimentary sticker declaring, “Let’s Texas.”