Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i Texas Highways Magazine

I took my first post-pandemic trip in May, aboard an airplane from New York City to Texas, to visit my 85-year-old mother, Bertha Troncoso, who lives in the same adobe house she and my father built in the mid-1960s. When my mother and father and their four children arrived in Ysleta, the small town was on the outskirts of east El Paso. Back then, Ysleta was a rural community with the Ysleta Mission as its anchor, established in 1682 by Spanish missionaries and a contingent of the Tigua tribe. The missionaries and tribe were fleeing the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and their ancestral home in the Isleta Pueblo, in what is now southern Albuquerque. Ysleta with a “Y” is where I grew up, where I went to Ysleta High School,…

POP. 6,084 When you look at a map of Gun Barrel City, the eastern boundary looks like a long gun barrel, which is how the town got its unconventional name and accompanying motto: “We shoot straight with you.” But if you’re expecting to find a town befitting a spaghetti Western, it’s best to look elsewhere. “Everybody wants to assume we have an old lawless history,” Mayor David Skains says. Instead, the town’s highlight is Cedar Creek Lake, the fourth largest lake in Texas. With about 320 miles of shoreline, visitors can enjoy swimming in the coves and fishing for largemouth bass, flathead catfish, and crappie. The ideal way to enjoy a relaxing getaway here is to rent a lake house or cabin, which you can find on vacation rental sites…

POP. 67 Love Shaks Starts at $35/night. airbnb.com/rooms/12106256 The Water Stop 1300 W. San Antonio St., Marfa. 432-386-8164 Within the tourist triad of Big Bend, Marfa, and Fort Davis, Valentine’s always been a bit lost somewhere to the west. It’s primarily known as the location of the Prada Marfa art installation and a place to get a romantic letter postmarked on Feb. 14. But the town’s profile is rising. Valentine’s vacant houses, commercial buildings, and handful of adobe structures are primed for revitalization. “Abandoned properties are seeing new life, being improved, spruced up, and lived in,” City Council member Laurel Keenan-Coniglio says. Clara Bensen, a writer who moved to the area in 2018, purchased two buildings and plans to turn them into Valentine Bar and Hiway Café. While there are…

POP. 6,678 Like many small college towns, Prairie View is sleepy. Residents go to neighboring towns to buy groceries, lodge guests, or use a bank. But it’s slowly waking up with roadway improvements, planned historical markers at Wyatt Chapel and Hope African Methodist Episcopal, and a history museum in the works at the historically Black college Prairie View A&M University. Frank Jackson, who served as the city’s mayor for 14 years and is now the assistant vice chancellor for state relations at PVAMU, welcomes the changes. “We’re like other historically Black college towns in the South like Grambling [in Louisiana] and Tuskegee [in Alabama],” he says. “There’s a lot here. We just haven’t told our story. Here’s where Texas’ second oldest university sprang out of a plantation.” The town, 50…

Holly Hearn is making wild alligator tikka masala in the kitchen of her father’s rural home near Beaumont. Her pug, Guts, snuffles the floor, hoping a wayward scrap will fall in his path. Hearn adds sour cream to her curry base as the fragrant mixture of onion, garlic, spices, and tomato paste simmers. “Tikka masala is supposed to be made with yogurt, but I find sour cream adds more fat and richness, which balances the lean meat,” she says. Alligator—both wild and farmed—is an intrinsic part of the culture and economy in this part of Southeast Texas, which is known as the Golden Triangle and includes the cities of Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur. Alligator was historically a vital source of protein for local Native American tribes and Cajun settlers.…

For a moment, Barrett Feller might have been the happiest 3-year-old in Texas as he ran ahead of his dad, Ronnie, to catch up to his mom, Renae. “Go on now,” Ronnie prompted, “tell her what you did.” “I rode that!” Barrett announced, pointing behind him at Pharaoh’s Fury, a colorful metal contraption festooned with lightbulbs. You’d recognize it instantly: a traditional carnival ride designed to induce centrifugal terror in amusement park fanatics. Willing participants get strapped into an open-air canister meant to resemble a royal Egyptian riverboat before the machine conspires with gravity to swing in semicircles both exciting and terrifying. Pharaoh’s Fury had inspired a newfound sense of bravery in Barrett, who shined like the sun with pride. “What are you going to do next?” his parents inquired.…

POP. 11,490 La Borde House Starts at $80/night. 601 E. Main St., Rio Grande City. labordehouse.com El Mexicano 2695 E. Grant St. 956-849-4275 If you feel like you’re standing on a movie set amid the sandstone dwellings of Roma’s historic plaza, that’s because you are. In the 1952 film Viva Zapata!, Marlon Brando swaggers among the balconied buildings that once housed Roma’s founding families, many of whose descendants still live in town. Just walking its dusty streets transports you to another era in the life of the history-rich border town. A plaque-guided walking tour of the plaza details Roma’s integral role in settling South Texas. Roma was the last trading port for 19th-century steamboats that traveled the Rio Grande. The church steeple that presides over the square was built by…

POP. 1,899 Peach Tree Guest Haus Starts at $119/night. 325-456-2216; edentexas.com/peach-tree-guesthaus On the Square Bakery and Deli 208 Jackson St. 325-763-8073; facebook.com/onthesquarebakery anddeli This biblically named town is heaven for music fans. Each year, 10 or so touring musicians stop at the Green Apple Art Center to play intimate shows. Nine years ago, rancher Craig Pfluger repurposed the old mohair processing factory and two contiguous buildings to create a “listening room” with indoor and outdoor stages. The all-volunteer nonprofit space gives those who visit—including Texas musicians like Charley Crockett and Joe Ely—a taste of the bucolic life the West Central Texas town is known for. After a show earlier this year, Austin guitarist Jackie Venson was introduced to the kid goats on Pfluger’s ranch. “You can’t experience Eden without some…

POP. 2,960 Red River Station Inn Starts at $95/night. 219 Clay St. 940-825-3107; redriverstationinn.com Fenoglio’s BBQ 510 W. US 82. 940-825-3843; fenogliobbq.com There’s a stretch of Nocona that makes you feel like you’re in 1960s Detroit. The exterior of the Horton Classic Car Museum features painted midcentury-style signage, while rows of candy-color classic cars line the interior. You might forget for a minute that you’re actually in 2021, just 8 miles from the Oklahoma border. The private collection of Nocona natives Pete and Barbara Horton includes about 120 cars, the oldest a 1931 red convertible Packard Phaeton with a pearl-color interior. Any hot-rod lover or aesthete can spend hours checking out the vehicles, buffed to such a shine you can see your reflection on them. The museum hearkens to the…

Ben Bussard is a happy kid. Age 11, he bursts out the door, BB gun in tow, and scrambles down the hill to Wolf Creek below the family’s log cabin. He and his best buddies will spend all day swimming, fishing, and floating down the current on their log raft. At night, instead of heading home, they will camp out next to a fire, swapping stories about their wild adventures. In tiny Lipscomb, a flyspeck village cradling a verdant creek valley in the far northeast corner of the Panhandle, “I can go anywhere I want for miles and miles and miles,” beams the boy, who sports dusty blue jeans and a widebrimmed Stetson over cropped blond hair. Ben’s been to Dallas and a few other big Texas cities, but he…

The worldwide demand for luxury animal-skin goods that began in the late 19th century led to the near extinction of the American alligator. In 1973, the species was officially protected by the Texas Endangered Species Act. Federal and state initiatives have enabled a successful comeback of the wild population in the U.S., and hunting was again legalized in Texas in the late 1980s. “Alligator farms are a critical part of the sustainable-use model that keeps the native population in place,” says Jonathan Warner, TPWD’s Alligator Program Leader. “Almost all farms get their eggs from the wild. They’re harvested by commercial collectors who pay landowners for access. Like hunting, which must be done by permit on private land, it’s an economic incentive that motivates owners to manage and protect alligator habitat.”…

If you’re looking to simply kick back under an old oak tree while knocking back a cold one, then you need to join Waylon, Willie, and the boys in this Hill Country honky-tonk town 10 miles southeast of Fredericksburg. But if you’re looking for an adventure, this region is bustling with things to do. Luckenbach Dancehall Founded by Germans in the 1840s, this small town had all but disappeared when storyteller and goat rancher Hondo Crouch, along with Kathy Morgan and Guich Koock, bought it in 1971. With eccentric events like the Mud Dauber Festival, Crouch turned the town into an outpost of the “outlaw country” genre. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings popularized the famous song “Luckenbach, Texas,” and visitors from all over the world still come to buy a…

Melanie Grizzel The Austin-based photographer enjoys capturing small-town life, like she did in “Bringing Back Brownwood” (Page 30). “Being able to spend a couple of days to immerse myself with the culture and the people and getting to know what they think makes their town so special is both an honor and a treat,” Grizzel says. “In the case of Brownwood, it’s the people. Brownwood’s town slogan is ‘Feels Like Home,’ and it really does.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times and People magazine. Sergio Troncoso Troncoso wrote “Dust to Dust” (Page 14) about returning home to Ysleta post-pandemic and reuniting with his mother. “The people give meaning to the land,” Troncoso says, “but to capture that meaning we need to patiently hear all of their stories.…

The year was 1991. At the Purple Sage Dance Hall in Uvalde, Jimmy Albarado asked Alma Alaniz to dance. He’d noticed her on campus at Southwest Texas Junior College, where they were both students. Alma accepted the dance, but didn’t say a word. “I came back to my buddy and said, ‘Worst dance of my life—I’ll never do that again,’” Jimmy recalls. “About three or four songs later, somebody taps me on the shoulder. It was Alma, saying, ‘What, is that it?’” Jimmy and Alma have been together ever since, making their home in the western Hill Country town of Leakey. Historically rooted in ranching, Leakey is a regular stop for campers, tubers, and motorcyclists visiting the Frio River and nearby Garner State Park, as well as a home base…

Inside the Kuckuck’s Nest in Fredericksburg, country tunes emanate from a small radio. But that’s not the only music playing. There’s also quiet ticking and sporadic cuckoos marking the passage of time. Store owner Paula Kager sells authentic German products like lederhosen, dirndls, and beer steins. She also stocks genuine cuckoo clocks, timepieces believed to have originated in Germany’s Black Forest, where the Brothers Grimm supposedly sought inspiration for fairy tales like “Sleeping Beauty” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Kager grew up in Ludwigshafen in southwestern Germany and remembers spending time as a child at her grandparents’ home. With great anticipation, she would sit by their clock, waiting for the cuckoo bird to arrive. “It seems like every house had one,” Kager says. “We’d tell Opa, ‘Make it move! Make it…

POP. 3,805 The red and yellow sign proclaiming “World Famous Hamburgers” illuminates a stretch of Interstate 20 in Canton, acting as a siren song for famished travelers. It isn’t a McDonald’s; it’s Dairy Palace, a 24-hour local institution that’s been in operation since 1984. And while it may not count “billions served” or boast international locations, the diner does have a fandom that spans the globe. “Our burgers are eaten by everybody,” manager Terry Hipp explains. “We pretty much have missionaries who go all over the world.” Customers eagerly send in photos of themselves posing with Dairy Palace bumper stickers in locales like Guatemala, Canada, and Iraq. Who wouldn’t be a fan of a restaurant that offers an elk burger, a stack of pancakes, and a chalupa? Canton, located an…

POP. 6,292 Queen Isabel Inn Starts at $125/night. 300 S. Garcia St. 956-943-1468; queenisabelinn.com Joe’s Oyster Bar and Gulf Seafood Market 207 E. Maxan St. 956-943-4501; gulfseafoodmarket.com Every year, hundreds of thousands of beachgoers headed to South Padre zip through Port Isabel, the last mainland town before crossing the causeway onto the island. They don’t know what they’re missing. The town is an authentic port with a shrimp fleet, fishing adventures, and a rich, colorful history. Its heart, the lighthouse overlooking the Lower Laguna Madre and the channel to the Gulf of Mexico, is a Texas icon. Across from the lighthouse, Port Isabel’s main strip includes the South Padre Island Dolphin Research & Sea Life Nature Center, which features hands-on exhibits and dolphin tours. Around the corner, you’ll find the…

POP. 3,009 The Hillside Boutique Hotel Starts at $234/night. 1651 US 90 W. 830-538-3200; hillsidetexas.com Luigi’s 1403 Angelo St. 830-444-0462; facebook.com/luigiscastroville With red poppies blooming in spring, European-style cottages, and more historical markers than stop signs, this quaint town is just as mellow and picturesque as the slow-moving Medina River that flows through it. Castroville—named for founder Henri Castro, who settled the town in 1844 after immigrating from the Alsatian region of France—is just 25 miles from San Antonio. The Old World charms are best experienced with a walking tour through the Alsatian dwellings of the historic district—paper guides are available at the Landmark Inn, a small museum where the staff is well-versed in local lore. Pit stops at the Magnolia Filling Station and its nearby cousin restaurant, Paris Street…

Garden gnomes of all shapes, sizes, and dispositions line the grounds of an outdoor food court in Argyle and dangle from the ceiling of a shop in Denton. Some smile mischievously while others hold their gardening tools at the ready, but all serve the purpose of welcoming patrons to Gnome Cones. Lifelong best friends Bret Hawkins and Alex Sparks founded Gnome Cones in 2017, when they began churning out their all-natural snow cones from a stand in the Fort Worth suburb of Argyle. The pair now owns two locations and a traveling van. Because the shop uses fresh fruit juice rather than artificial sweeteners in its syrups and no artificial dyes, Hawkins proposes the mythical woodland creatures would approve of Gnome Cones’ methods. “Gnomes are from the forest or the…

Spring Lake has attracted humans for millennia, its plentiful fresh water providing relief for indigenous Clovis people, Spanish explorers, and Texas cattle drovers. But most people wouldn’t know about the San Marcos natural treasure if not for a more recent chapter in the lake’s history, when mermaids, clowns, and a swimming pig named Ralph frolicked there. Spring Lake transformed during the heyday of Aquarena Springs, an amusement park that operated there from 1950 to 1996. The park’s underwater theater has since been removed, along with the fiberglass volcano that served as a dressing room for performers, the tic-tac-toeplaying chicken, the soaring gondola, and other vestiges of what once was one of the biggest commercial tourist attractions in Texas. “All of our friends in San Marcos worked at Aquarena Springs,” said…