Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i Texas Highways Magazine

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a river that evokes feelings of nostalgia. Perhaps it’s the tie to something ancient—the current that ripples over our feet carries the same water that sustained native tribes and beckoned early settlers to its shore. Maybe it’s that rivers remind us of the carefree way we played outdoors as children, before responsibilities and schedules stole the freedom and sense of wonder that marked our summer days. Beloved author John Graves considered time spent on a Texas river as an opportunity to reconnect with nature and ourselves. His journey down the Brazos, documented in 1960’s Goodbye to a River, continues to inspire many adventures, including one chronicled in this issue. Our new Managing Editor Wes Ferguson, who has authored two books on Texas rivers, puts it this way:…

IN AND AROUND JOHNSON CITY: Pedernales Falls State Park is at 2585 Park Road 6026. Call 830-868-7304; tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/pedernales-falls. Flat Creek Crossing Ranch is at 339 Ulrich Road. Reservations can be made for cabins or day use; the grounds include a 10-mile mountain bike trail and a swimming beach. Cabins run about $100 per night. All proceeds support Child Inc., an Austin nonprofit that provides low-income families with comprehensive early childhood education. Call 512-451-7361; flatcreekcrossingranch.com. Lady Bird Lane Cafe and the Science Mill are at 101 S. Lady Bird Lane. For the café, call 830-832-7884; ladybirdlanecafe.com; for the Science Mill, call 844-263-6405; sciencemill.org. Pecan Street Brewing is at 106 E. Pecan Drive. Call 830-868-2500; pecanstreetbrewing.com. The LBJ National Historical Park’s Johnson City wing is at 100 Lady Bird Lane. Tours of…

> San Antonio 2.5 hours > Houston 5.5 hours > Dallas 7 hours > El Paso 9.5 hours ASTROLL ACROSS THE SAN AGUSTÍN Plaza, just a few hundred feet from the Rio Grande in downtown Laredo, feels like a passage across both space and time. Sit on a bench in the shade of the ornate stone gazebo, next to sago palms and neatly trimmed hedges, and you could be in the town square of any classical Mexican city. Survey the 19th-century gothic revival cathedral and even older colonial homes around the plaza’s perimeter, and you can’t help but be transported back hundreds of years. When the Spanish army captain Tomás Sánchez founded Laredo in 1755, he chose the site because it was the location of an ancient Native American ford…

SITTING IN THE middle of the Coastal Bend is a town that’s been around since before Texas was Texas. Visitors to Victoria, established in 1824, can explore the rich history of the town’s past mixed with new experiences that make it well worth the trip. 9 a.m. Before exploring the region’s days of yore, I headed to House of Bread for breakfast. As soon as I entered, the heavenly aroma of cinnamon and freshly baked bread hit like a freight train to the nostrils. I followed my nose (and stomach) and ordered a homemade cinnamon roll, which looked more like a giant volcano with vanilla glaze lava. 10 a.m. Next, I visited the Museum of the Coastal Bend. The exhibits spanned centuries, from the Clovis natives to French settlers to…

HERB SMITH, ONE OF the many artists who call Wimberley home, fell in love with the village during an encounter with the Blanco River in 1974. He’d been working in Houston as an illustrator for medical educational materials when a bout of pink eye forced his daughter to miss her bus to a Hill Country summer camp, and Smith ended up driving her to Wimberley after she recovered. At the camp director’s recommendation, he pulled the family pop-up tent trailer into a now-defunct campsite at a picturesque area of the Blanco called the Little Arkansas, downstream from Wimberley. “The river was just beautiful,” he says of that first visit. “After driving in through the cypress trees for just a few seconds, I was hooked.” In 2002, Smith began building a…

Hippie Chic’s River Shack in Concan is part restaurant, part groovy hangout in a rustic setting framed by the Frio Canyon. WHEN TERRI ARCHER AND RAYANN Shudde purchased one and a half acres near Garner State Park in 2015, they intended to open a business renting out tubes for lazy floats on the Frio River in Concan. One day, their landscaper commented on the lack of good food in the area, Archer recalls: “He said he put himself through college flipping burgers out here and suggested we do the same.” And like that, Hippie Chic’s River Shack was born. An existing carport on the property was crowned with the sign “River Shack,” and the laid-back style of their burger concept took shape. The flourish of “Hippie Chic’s” nodded to their…

When Mother Nature doles up a summer afternoon so hot you need oven mitts to handle the steering wheel of your car, smart Texans head to the nearest swimming hole. There, beneath the lacy umbrella of a towering cypress or oak, you kick off your shoes, scramble up a tree trunk, reach for a rope as thick as your arm, and launch yourself high over a spring-fed lake or river. For a second or two you hover in mid-air, anticipating a moment you’ve been craving since the sun rose that morning. And then you feel it—the shock of hot to cold and dry to wet. We love the free-as-a-breeze feeling that comes when you take a flying leap off a rope swing. That’s why we’ve scouted the state to find…

“This town, this city, this border, Juárez—it is my great passion. If you don’t get that about me, you don’t get me.” DON’T BE SURPRISED IF YOU FALL IN LOVE with the characters in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s fiction. Be it with two high school friends taking on the world in his celebrated young-adult novels, or with people stumbling through loss in his short stories, or with the shining voice of his poetry, the El Paso-based writer expands your perspective and opens your heart. Since the global success of Sáenz’s 2012 book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe—a tale of two teenage boys in El Paso sorting through questions of identity, family, and love—he has become a star in the world of young adult fiction. At literary engagements…

I left with a dusty pack of 1991-era Donruss baseball cards and two postcards of flathead catfish laid across the tailgate of a Ford pickup truck. BOB FULLERTON, KNOWN TO MOST AS “BAD BOB,” was hunting wasps the first time I visited the general store he owned in the rural village of Bend, just upriver from Colorado Bend State Park. Fullerton didn’t use bug spray or a tennis racket. Instead, he took a BB gun in hand as he stalked the winged insects colonizing the eaves of Bad Bob’s Bend Store. Past the front screen door and the cedar posts that hold up the building’s rusted metal roof, he pumped his gun and took aim in the vicinity of firewood being sold by the bundle. Pop! A wasp fell. Fullerton…

RISING FROM CRYSTALLINE SPRINGS west of Fredericksburg, the Pedernales River meanders just 106 miles through the Hill Country before emptying into Lake Travis. Yet within its short course, the river crosses a multitude of landscapes, from rolling ranchland to steep limestone canyons. Each topography in turn has its own story to tell, from 10,000-year-old artifacts to hardscrabble German settlements and the birthplace of the nation’s 36th president. “Here is where I would always return, to the Pedernales River, the course of my childhood,” reminisced Lyndon B. Johnson in a quote inscribed at his namesake state park and historic site. Another LBJ quote on a nearby plaque reinforces the Pedernales’ influence, not just on the former president, but on its inhabitants throughout time: “It is impossible to live on this land…

BIKINIS AND SWIM TRUNKS MAY NOT BE TYPICAL concert-wear, but at Fort Worth’s summer music series Rockin’ the River, they’re pretty much mandatory. Every Saturday from July 7 to Aug. 11, Panther Island Pavilion is packed to the gills with swimsuit-clad music lovers listening to Texas tunes from the relative comfort and coolness of an inner tube on the Trinity River. Each night, five different bands serenade tubers from a stage facing the water. This summer’s lineup includes Cody Canada and The Departed, The Dirty River Boys, Jackie Venson, The Peterson Brothers, and Fort Worth-based favorites Grady Spencer & The Work. Tubes are available for rent—and there are plenty of food and beverage options for purchase. Just as in years past, each fest ends with a fireworks show; don’t worry…