Garland

It’s not my style to trip hatless. My head feels naked.

Lucky for me, Garland, Texas is the cowboy hat capital of Texas, a town that started with a fight over a post office and ended up smack in the middle of the DFW sprawl.

Here’s the thing: dig past the suburbs and Garland is full of surprises.

We go inside the factory behind Resistol and Stetson, where 3,000 hats a day get made by hand (I left with more than one, and I’m not apologizing).

We eat New Haven pizza that somehow traveled 1,500 miles to Main Street.

We get our hands on a guitar that sold for the price of a house, then dodge a copperhead on a mountain bike.

Dinner is a steaming bowl of pho in one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the US.

Turns out the hats are just the start. You ready for this?