This is the story of the “A Christmas Story” house, a trip we have to call “not so nerdy” because this movie is such a part of pop culture. An enterprising fan bought the house in Cleveland where the movie was made, and now thousands of people pay to visit it each year, including my friend Nancy and me in the fall of 2010.

It’s the trip that combined President Obama, Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, the Jimmy Dean “Sun” guy, a vibrator giveaway and a Nerd Trip to Grant’s tomb! BlogHer12 was quite a weekend.

Now for a look inside Southfork, a real house that’s been redecorated in the spirit of the TV show “Dallas,” with rooms dedicated to several of the characters. The decor, however, fits the specific year 1970 when the real house was built. The show debuted in 1978 and ran until 1991. Just go with it.

This post picks up our tour of the Southfork Ranch, home to the TV show “Dallas.” We already established that the house is smaller than it looks on TV. Many visitors are apparently surprised at how small the pool is, but it’s actually about as big as I thought it would be. Our guide told us the actors would have to go back (the crew may have pulled them back) to swim the same short lap over-and-over again to get the scenes completed. T

As someone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, I couldn’t go to Dallas without a trip to Southfork, home to TV’s Ewing family!

Several people warned me that I would be disappointed. “It’s much smaller than it looks on TV” and “It’s not what you’ll want to see,” they cautioned. But just like my appreciation for the show “Dallas,” I embraced the cheesiness, campiness and slight ridiculousness that is the Southfork Ranch!