Austin Hotelier Liz Lambert Talks Texas—from Midland to Marfa to South Congress
Penny the Chihuahua greets visitors with an inspection sniff outside the elevator leading to Bunkhouse, the ... Read More »
Downtown Christmas Lights in the Capital City in 1947
Austin had a population of about 115,000 when photographer Neal Douglass took this picture of Congress Avenue looking north to the Texas State Capitol on New Year’s Day 1947. The streetscape has changed over the past 71 years, and Austin has grown 10-fold to about 1 million people. But the electric Paramount Theatre sign, which was replaced in 2015, and the State Capitol building, which was completed in 1888, still anchor the storied strip. Read More »
Why Every Woman Should Take a Solo Road Trip
One sunny morning in July, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, I slide into the driver’s seat of my car and ... Read More »
My Hometown: Southwestern History Runs Deep in the Border Town of San Elizario
Explore the adobe streets of this colonial Spanish presidio town with artist and history buff Al Borrego. As he guides walking tours of San Elizario, Al Borrego paints a vivid picture of the town’s 400 years of borderland adventure and enterprise. On Main Street, Borrego describes the day in 1598 when explorer Juan de Oñate marched through with an expedition of 500 colonists. Outside the immaculate San Elizario presidio chapel, Borrego explains how the community was actually south of the Rio Grande until an 1829 flood realigned the river. Read More »
Festival of Texas Fiddling to Highlight Diverse Fiddle Styles in Blanco
Need a spark to shake off the post-Thanksgiving, start-of-the-holiday-marathon malaise? Fiddle music could be just the ticket. This Saturday, Dec. 1, The Festival of Texas Fiddling will bring together fiddlers from across the state for a day of performances, dancing, and workshops at the historic Twin Sisters Dancehall in Blanco. Read More »
Sarah Bird’s New Historical Novel Is Wild as an Acre of Snakes
In the debut of Texas Highways’ new monthly essay, Open Road, novelist Sarah Bird writes about walking the trails of J. Frank Dobie’s Paisano Ranch in the Texas Hill Country with the ghost of Cathy Williams, the only woman to join the Buffalo Soldiers, the African American army regiment formed after the Civil War. Since 1978, when Bird first heard about Williams at an African American rodeo, she had hoped Williams’ remarkable but mostly forgotten story would be told. After almost 40 years of waiting in vain, Bird decided that she would have to tell the story herself. The resulting novel—her 10th—is an exuberant, mind-opening page-turner of historical fiction, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen. Read More »
Former First Lady Laura Bush Takes Us on a Tour of Her Prairie Chapel Flower Garden
On a warm summer morning, former First Lady Laura Bush walked among the butterflies in the garden behind her dogtrot-style vacation house on Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford. The likes of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U2 singer Bono have ventured on these grounds before, but on this July day viceroys and queens were the VIPs. They flitted about as Bush interpreted the landscape. There’s antelope horns milkweed, she said. There’s gaillardia. There’s basket-flower, and there’s a gourd. “This one’s called purple mist, or blue mist,” she said. “If you want butterflies, then plant this.” Read More »
Executive Chef Gerard Thompson Embraces Biscuits and Frito Pie at the Lauded Rough Creek Lodge
Gerard Thompson wields a large, sharp knife with one hand and carries a wooden stand holding a cured hog’s leg in the other. He moves quickly to greet tables of newcomers and regular guests at Rough Creek Lodge. Thompson, the lodge’s executive chef, shaves off paper-thin slices of prosciutto from the ample pig trotter and hands them out as appetizers. Read More »
Home on the Texas Range, Where the Longhorns and Bison Play
An up-close visit with a Longhorn or bison can be humbling. The animals’ large chestnut-brown eyes reveal a complex blend of wild animal and domesticated stock. It’s hard to know whether they’re plotting an aggressive charge or happily anticipating a bucket of feed. Read More »
Need to Recenter? Try the Silent Treatment
In an attempt to quiet my mind and turn my attention inward, I’d come to the small town of Windom, an hour and a half northeast of Dallas, for a 36-hour silent retreat. Over a dinner of white rice, lentil curry, and homemade yogurt, my fellow retreaters at the Siddhayatan Spiritual Retreat Center, a Jain ashram, smiled knowingly as I folded my handwritten greeting into a square and tucked it into my pocket. “Oh, I did that for half a day once,” said Carmen, a 37-year-old mom from Saskatchewan, Canada, a devotee who’d come to the ashram to help out with a kids’ camp the following week. “It’s so hard if you’re a chatter like me.” Read More »
At Paisano Ranch, the Spirit of J. Frank Dobie—and the Muses—Abide
My personal slice of Texas paradise lies 14 miles southwest of Austin, tucked into the idyllic canyon that cradles ... Read More »
My Hometown: Explore San Felipe with the Town Mayor, a Descendant of a Slave from the Days of Stephen F. Austin’s First Colony
San Felipe, the hub of Stephen F. Austin’s original colony, may be the most historically significant Texas town you’ve never heard of. But that’s understandable: In 1836, residents burned San Felipe to the ground to keep it from the hands of the advancing Mexican army after the fall of the Alamo. The entire town—homes, taverns, one of the earliest print shops in Texas—was left in ashes, and few of its citizens returned. Read More »