Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i Texas Highways Magazine

Inspiring travel is Texas Highways’ lodestar. But within that broader mission, there has been a lot of room for nuance in our coverage over the decades, spanning the state’s history, culture, and distinctive character. When founding editor Frank Lively was conceptualizing the magazine’s editorial mission and tone in 1970, he suggested “a National Geographic approach. Besides running pretty pictures of Texas scenes, we will tell them in a personal way to draw the traveler here.” While early issues covered popular topics like scenic landscapes, flowers, history, and travel recommendations, there was plenty of editorial experimentation as well. The October 1978 issue featured a ballad about the demise of former boomtown New Birmingham: “doomed…from the moment a young, red-haired widow put her curse on it.” Other late ’70s and early ’80s…

In the early 1990s, Nancy Wrenn drove her minivan around Tyler with the back seats pulled out to accommodate a 3D mock-up on a 4-by-8-foot platform of what would eventually become the Discovery Science Place. The model demonstrated her vision for a place where children in the East Texas city could gain hands-on experience in the areas of science and math. This was more than 15 years before the Perot Museum of Nature and Science became a North Texas institution and nearly a decade before the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum was introduced on a national level. Wrenn took the prototype and her sales pitch to business owners and community leaders to secure funding for the building. A social worker at the time who focused on children’s education…

The desert songbird flits out from the shade, snatching up an insect and returning to its perch on the wing of the replica Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest flying animals to ever live. I’m standing in the Big Bend Fossil Discovery Exhibit, an open pavilion that serves as a museum and memorial to the fossil treasures of the state’s largest national park—and a place where the past and future seem to touch. That’s true across much of the state. Texas’ rocks span almost a billion years, from the first land ecosystems to the remains of animals that disappeared—in geological time—only yesterday. In between, oceans advanced and retreated, habitats and climates changed, and incredible animals roamed the state. Fossil riches have long attracted collectors and paleontologists to Texas, and many of…

The sweet, malty aroma of steamed rice greets you as soon as you hit the parking lot at SuTi Craft Distillery in Kennedale, about 10 miles southeast of Fort Worth. Following that buttery bouquet inside, you’ll find vintage memorabilia that evokes a bygone era: a rotary phone, a hand-crank phonograph, and an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder warbling doleful Vietnamese blues from the 1960s. Beyond the public tasting room, in the 2,500-square-foot warehouse, co-owner and brewer Suy Dinh stands atop a ladder perched over a fermentation tank where he monitors the conversion of rice into the niche liquor of his homeland. In addition to those tanks, his tools include a still and a mash tun, the equivalent of a humongous rice cooker capable of steaming 650 pounds of rice at a…

When Brenda Barrio moved to the “funky little town” of Denton to attend the University of North Texas in 2003, she would have never guessed she’d be the university’s assistant vice president of research and innovation 20 years later. “One of our goals is to help more students engage in research, especially those who come from marginalized communities,” she says. Located about 40 miles northwest of Dallas, the university has transformed since Barrio was an undergrad alongside a student body of 23,000. She recalls seeing longhorns and cows from the western part of campus, where now there are shopping centers and homes. Today, the university enrolls nearly 47,000 students. “But the nice thing is that it’s kept its essence,” Barrio says. In 2015, UNT was designated as an R1 university,…

As Texans get a front-row seat to a magnificent total solar eclipse this month, interest in astronomy has reached a record high. But stargazing in this state is fantastic all the time, not just during eclipses. You only need to travel just outside of the state’s major metropolitan areas, where pitch black night skies are punctuated with swirls of galaxies and planets, to experience some of the best stargazing around. These resorts, motels, and dude ranches are the perfect places to stay if you are a budding astronomer—or have one in the family. Canyon of the Eagles BURNET Situated at the upper end of Texas’ chain of Highland Lakes, Canyon of the Eagles overlooks Lake Buchanan. The resort offers a secluded, comfortable getaway on 940 acres of mostly undeveloped land…

An urban dweller ventures to far West Texas with a dream to transform a barren desert into a lush forest FRAMED BY THE VASTNESS of the Chihuahuan Desert, a lone man faces the camera. All around him, rough hills roll off into the distance. Clouds trail across an enormous sky, and mountain peaks decorate the horizon. “My name is Shaun Overton,” he says. He grins, then points to the barren ground at his feet. “And I’m turning this into a desert forest.” Growing trees in this unforgiving terrain is a promise Overton makes every time he introduces a new episode of Dustups. The video series documents his attempt at “turning 320 acres of wasteland into a desert forest in the most isolated spot in Texas.” Overton’s so-called wasteland, Dustups Ranch,…

On 100 acres of land outside Temple, an agricultural revolution is underway. And it doesn’t require a tractor, a plow, or even a shovel. Last summer, Revol Greens, the largest lettuce greenhouse grower in North America, opened a sprawling 20-acre facility in the Central Texas town that can produce as much as 24,000 pounds of lettuce a day. To put that into perspective, that is almost the equivalent of how much lettuce can grow on 1 acre of traditional farmland in an entire year. Greenhouse farming, known as controlled environment agriculture (or CEA), isn’t new, but Revol has implemented cutting-edge technologies that reduce the risk of crop failure and food-borne illnesses in an industry that has been plagued with food safety issues. Over the past 20 years, scores of Americans…

When I was in elementary school and we lived in Colorado, I spent three consecutive summers in Juárez, Mexico. Since my parents worked, there was no one to watch me. So, when school let out, my parents drove nine hours to El Paso, then across the border to Juárez, where they dropped me at my grandmother’s house. With so many people there—grandparents, great-grandmother, aunt, cousin, and three uncles—there was always something going on. Always someone yelling. Always an uncle to wrestle with. Always another uncle who’d jam dirty socks in my mouth when I tried to sleep. That always made them laugh. “A DORMIR!” my grandfather’s voice would rumble from across the hallway. He was a butcher who left home hours before sunrise, so he’d be in bed before sunset.…

Ask a Texan if they know where La Grange is and they’ll probably tell you one of two things: “I’ve driven past there,” or “Like the ZZ Top song?” Yes, La Grange’s claim to fame is the Chicken Ranch, the famed brothel with “a lotta nice girls,” as ZZ Top mumbles in the song that shares the town’s name—the same brothel that the movie The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is based on. But the town has a rich history beyond the Chicken Ranch. Its growth was fueled by an influx of Czech and German immigrants in the mid-1800s, many of whose descendants still reside in the area. The Fayette County Courthouse looms over the town square, which is lined with restaurants and boutiques perfect for picking up tchotchkes. Over…

Eli Halpern wandered the congested avenues of Bangkok with a growing hunger in his gut and a willingness to try anything. It was a humid night in 2012, and the visiting American martial artist traipsed between the mobile food peddlers and street stalls venting billowing clouds of wok smoke. Free from his lessons in Muay Thai, Halpern sidled up to one vendor and encountered his first edible creepy crawly. Served on a skewer, barbecued scorpion was mainly sold to gawking tourists as a gimmick-on-a-stick. Nonetheless, Halpern found the offering both delicious—he describes it as “a combination of fried chicken and a poached egg”—and full of promise. “I thought it would be really interesting to create a company for a market that doesn’t exist and a product that doesn’t really exist,…

My muscles shake as I climb up the inside of a seemingly endless vertical tunnel, stopping at platforms along the way to catch my breath. Alongside a handful of companions from Invenergy and a photographer, I make my way up a 300-foot wind turbine near the West Texas town of Stanton. On this 2019 trip, we’re led by Jake Thompson, manager of the clean energy company’s wind farm. At the top, I climb out, tether myself to rails on the surface, and gaze at the magnificent, spare landscape of the Permian Basin. Lines of lazily spinning wind turbines stretch out toward the horizon, but I see familiar pumpjacks, too, and in the distance, flaring natural gas at the top of pipes dancing brightly. And while I can’t see them from…

Just 18 miles west of Waco lies McGregor, a slow-paced suburb with a charming downtown area. This town of 5,300 people has hosted some of the region’s favorite personalities, such as former president George W. Bush, who has a ranch in nearby Crawford, and Chip and Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upper fame. The McGregor House, a Victorian home transformed into a vacation rental, was once featured on the TV show. (At the time it was a bed-and-breakfast called the Magnolia House.) It’s been a quiet town for most of its history, except for when it was home to a munitions factory during World War II. Then, in 2003, SpaceX began testing rocket engines at a facility just to the southwest, occasionally disturbing the peace in this sleepy town. Coffee Shop…