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Location is important for practically any dining establishment. For Midpoint Café in Adrian, location is everything. The restaurant would likely not exist if
it wasn’t precisely 1,139 miles from Chicago and 1,139 miles from Los Angeles—the halfway point on storied Route 66.
Join Amberly, Rich, and Luke as they head to Palo Duro Canyon, Amarillo, and tour the Texas Panhandle in the July edition of “A Piece of Texas.”
Whether you plan to spend Independence Day with a cookout, barbecue, or picnic, we’ve got crowd-pleasing recipes that are sure to keep your guests satisfied.
The venerable but long-vacated Baker Hotel, which opened in Mineral Wells in 1929 and once hosted personalities such as Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and president Lyndon Johnson, is poised to surge back to life under a newly announced $65 million renovation slated for completion in 2022.
My children stepped foot in Abilene for the first time in their short lives last June for a quick three-night visit. Now, even though it’s been a year, mention Abilene to them and you’ll get a happy earful of stories.
This fond association traces directly to the Children’s Art & Literacy Festival, an annual celebration of all things picture books. Most people know Abilene as the capital of the Big Country, a dusty railroad outpost thick with steakhouses and Churches of Christ. But for three days every June, the festival (known as CALF) cloaks downtown Abilene in an imaginative world of colorful characters and fanciful tales—and ice cream vendors aplenty.
On the cowboy poetry scene, Lubbock’s Andy Hedges stands out from the crowd as a fresh-faced performer, a 30-something practitioner of an American folk tradition often dominated by graybeards (and gray mustaches).
The wide-open spaces and generally flat landscape make the plains of Texas a prime location for wind energy production. With nothing to block the view for miles, the environment also makes for some spectacular storm viewing. The two combine in this electric image of a storm passing over a wind farm near Sweetwater.
Your first time in Canyon, you’ll be forgiven for wondering where this Panhandle community of about 15,000 gets its name. Heading into town, you pass beehives from a local honey farm, the sprawling campus of West Texas A&M University, and tidy brick houses. What you won’t see is anything resembling a canyon.
Texas is awash in color after a wet fall and winter. These are some of our favorite photos readers have shared with us so far this year.
Awed by the spectacular variety of wildflowers throughout Texas, we sent four photographers on a springtime mission across the state. They combed seven distinct regions of Texas, from the shaded forests of the Piney Woods to the mountains and deserts of the Big Bend, from sandy coastal dunes to rolling hills and the vast plains of the Panhandle. The results are as magnificent and diverse as the lands that nurture our abundant blossoms.
Texas is already known for being big. But in our beloved “Big Country,” things are taken to another level. When visiting Sweetwater, the history seems a little richer, the stories a little grander, and the snakes a little longer. If you find yourself in this Big Country town, don’t miss these spots.
Terry Allen wears many hats, not that you’ll catch him in a Stetson. Twangy as all get out, the pioneering Texas country singer still enjoys a cult following for his first two albums.
Set and filmed in West Texas, the oil boom period piece starts screening Feb. 22. West Texas wildcatters have long been mythologized on screen in classic films like Giant and There Will Be Blood. This month, The Iron Orchard follows in those footsteps with its dramatic tale of greed, lust, and hunger during the oil boom of the 1930s through ’50s.
The Iron Orchard is based off a novel of the same name written by Tom Pendleton (a nom de plume of Fort Worth writer and oil producer Edmund Van Zandt). The book caused a stir when it was published in 1966 and has since become a beloved classic for many in the Texas oil industry—in fact, a group of oilmen subsidized the independent film, directed by Midland native Ty Roberts.
The Texas Observer reports a sharp decline in visitors and slashed funding at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
The top stops in Texas on the ‘Mother Road of America’
Michael Martin Murphey’s singing rings with the sincerity and authenticity that many find lacking in pop country these days. Nowhere is that more apparent than during Murphey’s annual Cowboy Christmas tour, a series of holiday shows throughout the Southwest that feature a mix of traditional Christmas songs, a few Murphey classics, and cowboy poetry and storytelling.
There was a time when going home for the holidays meant taking the train. Whether boarding a steam locomotive or the electric interurban, passengers who could afford a ticket enjoyed unheard-of advantages in speed and comfort over horse-drawn coaches and the earliest automobiles.
Worldwide, Amarillo is probably most famous for The Big Texan Steak Ranch and its free 72-ounce steak (“if eaten in one hour”), a deal promoted on billboards from Arizona to Arkansas.
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.
Searching for down-home comfort food? Try Wiley’s Old Fashioned Bar-B-Q and Burgers on the East Side.
The four-story Grace Museum occupies the Mission Revival-style 1909 Grace Hotel. A neon sign glows on the rooftop, and the museum hosts an interesting collection of permanent and traveling exhibits.
Texas is vast, and the decisions are wide open when hunger strikes on those long hauls across the state. Sure, you could pull up to the nearest drive-thru window (again), but there’s nothing boldest or grandest about a bag of fast food—especially when exceptional mom-and-pop restaurants are dishing up affordable comfort a little farther down the line. Whether you’re hankering for a taste of home or the meal less traveled, sometimes you just need to get out of the car and into a diner booth.
Not far from the banks of the Canadian River, tucked among the River Valley Pioneer Museum’s artifacts of Panhandle ranching and railroad history, black-and-white portraits gaze from the gallery wall as if they’ve been waiting patiently for a century to look you in the eye.
Texas’ Historic County Courthouses shine with grandiosity and ambition. Often politically controversial because of their expense, courthouse projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries lasted years as counties selected architects and builders, quarried and imported materials, then painstakingly assembled the larger-than-life landmarks in the middle of town. It’s not hard to imagine a farmer stopping by a courthouse construction site to take in the scene, scratching his head at the columns, parapets, and towers rising from the prairie.
Step into the real Texas in Amarillo, where the rugged western ranches of the Panhandle Plains meet the vibrancy of a blossoming downtown.
Discover real Texas in Abilene. Spend a few days scouting this legendary area, and you’ll find a Texas city where Western heritage is both a birthright and a pastime.
Lubbock is called the “Hub City.” It is home to Texas Tech University and is known for its legendary ranching and music heritage, vibrant arts culture, and award-winning wineries.
At Texas Highways, we’ve learned a few things over the years about spring wildflowers in Texas: We have lots of them, many kinds, all over the place. We’ve learned this, too: Once Mother Nature shakes off winter’s chill, there’s no better way to celebrate the new season than with a wildflower-focused road trip.
The sky in Lubbock sprawls from horizon to horizon, soaring overhead like the sandhill cranes that pass through twice a year.
Abilene
is on 1-20 about 150 miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Travelers on the Caprock Canyons Trailway sometimes feel they’ve tipped time’s arrow on its head. Following the path of an abandoned rail line, the 64-mile trail system takes hikers, cyclists, and equestrians across the region’s halcyon backyard, into the agrarian plains and broken rangeland of caprock country, and out of this century completely.
This is a godforsaken land. It only grows what it wants, and it wants sculpture.’
The Texas Hill Country, with its limestone bluffs and undulating landscape of live oaks and cedars, bears some resemblance to the Mediterranean countryside.
September—when the autumnal equinox brings an official end to summer and temperatures start to cool, ever so slightly at first—is my favorite time to visit Abilene.
Travel down any Texas highway, regardless of direction, season, or time of day, and you will pass a windmill.
As a teenager, I spent a good part of each summer strolling the sand at Galveston.
Three beguiling bottlenose dolphins —D.J., Shadow and Kai—reign as the undisputed stars of the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi.
The Texas Big Bend country creates fantasy, illusion, mystery. Wide-open spaces, fabulous light, and the wild creatures and eccentric characters that typify the region suggest that a trip into the untamed Chihuahuan Desert can be not only fascinating, but also transformative.
Determined to take a West Texas walk one particularly blustery spring day, my son and I blew into Fort Davis.
The night skies of Texas’ Big Bend country often mesmerize in ways that mirror the peculiarities of dark dreams and lullabies.
Published 10 times per year by the Texas Department of Transportation, Texas Highways, the official travel magazine of Texas, encourages travel to and within the Lone Star State and tells the Texas story to readers around the world.
