The Best Weekend Getaways in Texas

Texas got its first national park on June 12, 1944, and it is still the best argument in the state for a long tank of gas. The Rio Grande runs 118 miles along the boundary, cutting the sheer slot of Santa Elena Canyon, and since 2012 the whole place has been an international dark-sky park. One weekend honestly covers the Chisos Basin and one canyon; itineraries claiming more are lying.

German settlers under John O. Meusebach laid the town out in 1846 and named it for Prince Frederick of Prussia; it is still the center of the Texas German dialect. The tasting rooms get the crowds — this is the standard base for Hill Country wine country — but the National Museum of the Pacific War, built around hometown admiral Chester Nimitz, is what justifies the second day. Allow it three hours, not one.

Skip the day-trip framing — the missions alone justify a hotel night. The Alamo and San Antonio Missions National Historical Park were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015, and riding the river trail between the four southern missions takes the better part of a day. The River Walk is the city's second-most-visited attraction; walk it at breakfast, before the barges, and it belongs to you.

A railroad water stop from the early 1880s became the most argued-about art town in America. Donald Judd moved out from New York in 1971, and in 1979 began converting the buildings of decommissioned Fort D. A. Russell into permanent installations — see them slowly or not at all. After dark, join the skeptics at the official lights viewing station nine miles east of town on US 67, and watch everybody pretend not to care.

Deadliest natural disaster in United States history is a heavy thing for a beach town to carry: the 1900 hurricane killed an estimated 8,000 people here. What survived became the draw — the Victorian buildings of the Strand National Historic Landmark District now run as restaurants, museums and antique stores. Stay the night; the day crowd drains back over the causeway by early evening and the island exhales.

Second-largest canyon in the country, by the state's own billing, and the flat Panhandle drive gives no warning until the ground opens at the rim. Civilian Conservation Corps crews developed the 28,000-acre park between 1933 and 1937. On summer nights the canyon hosts Texas, an outdoor musical drama performed by Panhandle actors and singers; pair the show with a dawn hike, because afternoon down there is a furnace.

Getting there is the ritual: a free ferry runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the only established town on Mustang Island waits on the far side. Sport fishing for spotted seatrout and redfish is the resident religion, and the town rebuilt itself after taking Hurricane Harvey's landfall head-on in August 2017. Rent a beach house with a group — this was never a hotel town.

At 4,900 feet the highest county seat in Texas, which is why summer nights want a jacket and the sky is the local economy. McDonald Observatory, up in the Davis Mountains, runs public star parties every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday evening, with telescopes set out for visitors. Fort Davis National Historic Site fills the other half of the weekend. Reserve the star party before you reserve the room.

Crossing the Queen Isabella Causeway from Port Isabel is when the trip starts — the resort town on the far side runs entirely on beach time. Between swims, Sea Turtle, Inc. rehabilitates injured sea turtles and walks the public through its work, which redeems any windy afternoon. It is the longest drive on this list from nearly everywhere in Texas; take two nights, because one wastes the mileage.

Every summer evening since the 1940s, campers have gathered for a jukebox dance at the concession building the Civilian Conservation Corps put up — a tradition strong enough that families book the same week for generations. The park opened in 1941 on 2.9 miles of the Frio River near Concan, and floating that cold green water is the daytime program. Reserve far ahead; demand outruns the campsites.

Nothing else in Texas looks like it: 25,400 acres of lake and bayou draped over the Louisiana line, holding one of the largest flooded bald cypress forests in the United States. In October 1993 it became a Ramsar-protected wetland, one of just thirteen US sites then under the convention. Paddle it with a guide the first time; the channels between the trees eat a newcomer's sense of direction.

Steamboats reached this landing on Big Cypress Bayou by early 1844, and by the late 1840s the town had become the state's leading inland port, sending cotton downstream toward New Orleans. When the river trade died, the buildings simply stayed. A three-day pilgrimage tours the mid-nineteenth-century homes each spring, complete with a reenactment of the Diamond Bessie murder trial that has run since 1955. Sleep in one of the old houses.

Eighty-seven residents at the 2020 census, and an antiques fair that pulls enormous crowds through every spring and fall — the ratio is the whole attraction. Between shows, the Round Top Festival Institute keeps young musicians and faculty in residence, so an ordinary Saturday can produce a serious concert in a town smaller than the orchestra. Book fair weeks a season out, or come between them and have the place to yourself.