Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

The ultimate hill country tour: a guide to the quaint towns, scenic views, back roads, and other stops along the way.

Article Excerpt
SOME SAY it is the hills, rising out of the flatlands as Texas' gateway to the west, that make the Hill Country special. Others are drawn to the oaks, the pastoral fields, the artesian springs from which rivers flow past limestone bluffs, the ravines and pocket canyons, the sturdy craftsmanship of the German towns, and the even sturdier stock of people who built them. For me, though, the real beauty of the Texas Hill Country lies in its many contradictions. This region is the geographic and emotional essence of Texas, yet it is like nowhere else in the state.

The Hill Country is an abrupt change from the plains to the east, but it is by no means mountainous, like far West Texas. Yet no part of Texas has more wildflowers in the spring. The Hill Country shares in none of the great Texas myths: no cotton, no cattle kingdoms, no oil. In an urban state, it remains a place of small towns and villages. Railroads bypassed the Hill Country because of the difficult terrain, and even today, with the exception of Interstate 10, no heavily traveled major highway traverses it--thank God.

President Lyndon Johnson brought the first national attention to the Hill Country in the sixties, when his ranch east of Fredericksburg became the Texas White House. Until then, the Hill Country was a well kept secret. That anonymity was a blessing. While everywhere else worth visiting in the American West was getting loved to death, the Hill Country remained unsullied.

The first wave of visitors who started showing up in large numbers twenty years ago were bluebonnet lovers, peach eaters, canoeists and tubers, fishermen and hunters--your basic urbanites fleeing the city in search of an escape. Many were inspired by a 1977 song called "Luckenbach, Texas," sung by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Their sentiment in romanticizing the Hill Country experience was dead on, as expressed in the refrain, "Maybe it's time we got back to the basics." Crowds responded in kind, returning to the roots they never had.

More recently, though, movie types have been moving in from Hollywood, and a second wave of visitors has come from all over. The word is out that the Hill Country has the same enchanting natural beauty once attributed to places like Santa Fe and Carmel. But being discovered often comes at the expense of the very qualities that attracted visitors in the first place. This raises the specter of the Hill Country becoming more of a hot spot and less of a state of mind.

For all of my adult life, I've visited places in and near the Hill Country--Kerrville for the folk music festival, Fredericksburg for peaches, Llano for barbecue, the rivers for swimming and canoeing. Yet I have seldom thought of the Hill Country as a single place, rather than as individual destinations. So I got in my pickup and started driving. I came back with a route I call my ultimate Hill...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!