9 Serene Texas Towns For A Weekend Retreat
A good Texas weekend is mostly about finding shade and cool water before the heat wins. Bastrop hides a pine forest that drops the temperature the second you walk under it. Wimberley has a spring-fed swimming hole cold enough in August to make you gasp. Rockport keeps a mile of raked Gulf sand with no cars and no crowds. Here are nine towns, each one an easy place to slow down.
Wimberley
Blue Hole Regional Park is the reason most people first drive out to Wimberley, southwest of Austin in the Hill Country. The swimming hole sits in deep shade under old cypress trees, fed by Cypress Creek, and the water stays cold through August. Summer swims are reserved in timed sessions, so the crowd never gets past a certain size and the place keeps its calm even on a July afternoon. The park also has hiking trails and a summer concert series that runs in the evenings once the heat lets go.
For the long view, there is Old Baldy, a hill named for its bare limestone crown where nothing much grows. The climb is 218 steps to the top, and the payoff is an open look across the Blanco River valley and the cypress line below. Down in town, Wimberley Square fills with a market on the first Saturday of the month, and the Wimberley Cafe handles breakfast for anyone who came in early to beat the heat.
Bastrop
The pines are the surprise here. Bastrop, east of Austin, sits in the Lost Pines, an island of loblolly forest cut off from the main East Texas pine belt by roughly a hundred miles of prairie. Bastrop State Park runs its trails through that canopy, and the shade drops the temperature enough to feel it. The park rents cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, which stay booked most weekends, so the reservation goes in early.
The Colorado River runs along the edge of town, and the old downtown along Main Street has held onto its 19th-century storefronts. For dinner, Southside Market traces its Elgin roots to 1882 and opened this Bastrop location in 2014; the brisket and the coarse-ground Elgin sausage are what to order. McKinney Roughs Nature Park, a little further out, adds river-bottom trails where four ecosystems meet.
Rockport
Rockport Beach was the first beach in Texas to earn Blue Wave certification from the Clean Beaches Coalition, which grades on water quality, accessibility, and litter. It shows in the details: shallow, calm water off a curved spit on Aransas Bay, a saltwater pool at the east end, and a mile of raked sand that stays walkable. Vehicles, dogs, and bonfires are all kept off, which is a large part of why the place stays quiet. Grandma B's Sweet Treats, a short walk up, covers the ice cream.
The other half of Rockport is its galleries. The Austin Street Art Walk runs the second Saturday of the month from spring through the holidays, when the studios along the downtown arts district open their doors alongside live music and food. Wind Way Gallery and the Rockport Center for the Arts anchor the strip, and the Center's sculpture garden near the harbor is open and free year-round. The Inn at Fulton Harbor puts you on the water for the night.
Llano
The Llano River is the draw in Llano, northwest of Austin at the edge of the Hill Country. Badu Park sits right on the water where the river runs shallow over granite slabs, a spot locals use for wading and picnics through the warm months. Black Rock Park, a little upstream on Lake Buchanan, adds a swimming area and primitive campsites for anyone staying overnight. The 1893 pink-granite courthouse on the square is the visual center of town, built from the same stone that surfaces all over this stretch of country.
Llano also has a real claim on Texas barbecue. Cooper's Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que built its name on mesquite-smoked meat you pick from the pit out front, and it draws a line most weekends. The square around the courthouse fills out the rest of a slow afternoon, with a handful of shops and cafes and not much hurry to any of it.
Alpine
Alpine trades water for altitude. At around 4,500 feet in the Davis Mountains foothills of far West Texas, it runs cooler and drier than the rest of the state, and the nights turn genuinely dark. That darkness is the regional specialty. The McDonald Observatory, up the road in the Davis Mountains, runs public star parties, and Big Bend National Park, roughly a hundred miles south, is one of the least light-polluted places in the Lower 48.
The town itself carries Sul Ross State University and a walkable downtown with more going on than its size suggests. The Museum of the Big Bend lays out the region's history for anyone heading to the park, and the local Mexican kitchens are worth planning a meal around. The Holland Hotel, on the main drag since 1928, is the place to stay if you want to be able to walk to dinner.
Port Isabel
Port Isabel keeps the working-harbor feel that South Padre Island traded away years ago. The town sits on the mainland side of the Laguna Madre, and its shrimp boats still run out of the harbor. The Port Isabel Lighthouse, built in 1852 and one of the few Texas lighthouses open to climbers, sits right in the middle of town; the view from the top takes in the causeway, the lagoon, and the island beyond.
The Laguna Madre is the real reason to come. It is one of only a handful of hypersaline lagoons on earth, and the shallow flats make it prime water for kayaking, wade fishing, and birding. Fresh Gulf shrimp comes off the boats and onto plates at spots like Dirty Al's out at the harbor. South Padre and its beaches are a short drive over the causeway when you want sand.
Dripping Springs
Hamilton Pool is the picture most people have of Dripping Springs, west of Austin: a jade-green swimming hole under a collapsed grotto, with a 50-foot waterfall spilling over the rim into the pool below. It is fragile enough that the county requires a reservation to visit and closes swimming when bacteria levels run high, so the visit takes a little planning. The reward is one of the more striking natural swimming spots in the state.
Pedernales Falls State Park, a short way north, spreads the Pedernales River across wide limestone shelves you can walk out onto when the water is low. The Twin Falls and Wolf Mountain trails cover the rest of the park. Dripping Springs also sits at the front of the Hill Country wine country, and tasting rooms like Bell Springs give the afternoon a slower alternative to the trails.
Fredericksburg
Fredericksburg was settled by German immigrants in 1846, and the town still runs on that heritage. Main Street is lined with the biergartens and bakeries that came with it, the Old German Bakery and the Altdorf among them, and the Pioneer Museum lays out how the early settlers lived. The National Museum of the Pacific War, expanded around the boyhood home of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, is the town's other anchor and holds one of the deepest World War II collections in the country.
The country around town is the quiet part. Enchanted Rock, 18 miles north, is a massive pink-granite dome, and the Summit Trail climbs it in under a mile for a view across the whole Llano Uplift. Wineries line the road east toward Stonewall, and peach stands open along Highway 290 through the early summer. The Hoffman Haus, a few blocks off Main, keeps the overnight within walking distance of dinner.
Castroville
Castroville is the Alsatian corner of Texas. Henri Castro settled it in 1844 with immigrants from Alsace, the region on France's German border, and the town kept the steep-roofed, stone-and-plaster houses they built. More than 70 of those early buildings still stand. The Steinbach Haus, a 17th-century Alsatian home dismantled in Wahlbach, France, and rebuilt here in 2002, now serves as the visitors center and is the best single look at where the style came from.
The Medina River bends around the south edge of town through Castroville Regional Park, 126 acres of Spanish-moss shade with a swimming stretch of river and the Cross Hill Loop, a one-mile climb to a view over the rooftops. In town, the Landmark Inn State Historic Site has taken in travelers along the river since 1849 and still rents its eight rooms, each furnished to a different decade. Haby's Alsatian Bakery, across from the Steinbach Haus, handles the kugelhopf.
Nine Ways To Spend A Quiet Weekend
What ties these towns together is not a single kind of trip but a single kind of pace. The cold spring water at Wimberley and Dripping Springs, the pine shade at Bastrop, the dark sky over Alpine, and the working harbor at Port Isabel each ask you to slow to the speed of the place. Pick the one whose particular quiet suits the weekend you need, and the rest of the trip tends to arrange itself.
