Book excerpt: The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is a nearly 40-mile long mega-metropolitan area anchored by Dallas on one end and Fort Worth on the other, with the area between filled in with more than a dozen attractive, interconnected cities. Among the unheralded facts about these interlocking cities are that they contain more restaurants per capita than New York City (5,000 in Dallas alone), are home to all the major professional sports (including NASCAR and rodeo), and house 30 museums. This guidebook gives readers detailed information on the wide range of choices in lodging, restaurants, and everything worth seeing and doing, not only in Dallas and Fort Worth, but in eleven of the smaller cities between the two. They include: Addison, Arlington, Farmers Branch, Garland, Grand Prairie, Grapevine, Irving, Mesquite, North Richland Hills, Plano and Richardson. In addition to the categories one would normally expect in a guide book, the authors have started each city listing with a description of free visitor services, as well as "Bird's Eye View" spots - great places to get a panoramic view of the city. (In Arlington it's the top of an oil derrick at Six Flags.) Finally, for the truly adventurous, there are plenty of "Offbeat" places of unusual interest that don't fit into the routine tourist categories.