Travel

Weekends in April

April is a great time to marry your love for wine and wildflowers. Dozens of wineries along three Texas wildflower trails are holding wine and food tastings throughout April.

Weekends in April

April is a great time to marry your love for wine and wildflowers. Dozens of wineries along three Texas wildflower trails are holding wine and food tastings throughout April.

Editor’s Note: The Texas Historic Commission outlines 12 Texas regions of interest in its Texas Heritage Trails program. The following is a look at the Texas Hill Country Trail, the first part of a series on these trails.

Serenity on tap. A historical treasure chest brimming with natural gems. A place where you can have your high art and your barbecue, too, washed down with a bottleneck of Ziegenbach. More than 19 counties and a crock pot of German, Mexican and cowboy culture comprise the Texas Hill Country, one of Lone Star’s best-kept secrets. The Texas Historic Commission wants Texans—and the rest of the world—to know about this mystique.

Editor’s Note: The Texas Historic Commission outlines 12 Texas regions of interest in its Texas Heritage Trails program. The following is a look at the Texas Hill Country Trail, the first part of a series on these trails.

Serenity on tap. A historical treasure chest brimming with natural gems. A place where you can have your high art and your barbecue, too, washed down with a bottleneck of Ziegenbach. More than 19 counties and a crock pot of German, Mexican and cowboy culture comprise the Texas Hill Country, one of Lone Star’s best-kept secrets. The Texas Historic Commission wants Texans—and the rest of the world—to know about this mystique.

Famous for its architecture, infamous for the tales that surround events in the early days of its founding, the Sutton County Courthouse is one of more than a dozen historical landmarks on the Sonora Downtown Historic Walking Tour, which also includes the Miers Home Museum, Old County Jail, Old Santa Fe Depot and others.

With the sound of polka music emanating from the upstairs dance hall, and the tantalizing smell of topinka wafting from the downstairs restaurant, a bygone era has been resurrected in Schulenburg, Texas, with the reopening of historic Sengelmann Hall.

“I’m more afraid riding in the car!” claims aerobatic pilot and wingwalker, Teresa Stokes of Houston, who, for 20 years, has been performing aerodynamic feats with her partner and pilot, Gene Soucy. This, coming from a woman who, at times, is being held in place by nothing more than centrifical force! “I’m not going anywhere,” she says calmly.

Increasingly, Texans are becoming aware that they don’t have to go to distant locales to enjoy the traditional wine country tasting room experience.

Feeling frisky this spring? Then grab a friend (or two) and head out to nurture your inner adventurer. Several area businesses offer hair-raising fun, and fodder for great stories that you’ll enjoy sharing for years to come.

Take a Chopper Tour

For me the Texas Hill Country comes in two versions.

In Sheryl Brakey’s home office hangs a Rand McNally World Map with a blaze of small orange dots—each denoting her worldwide travels, from the Seven Seas to Tibet.

Along the way, this Fair Oaks Ranch resident fused a passion for filming and journaling her travels with lifelong interest in biology and technology. “From the very beginning, people loved my videos, and I began to realize I had a knack for editing,” says Brakey, who took up the skill later in life, after a trip with her husband to China, Nepal and Tibet. She formed SJB Productions, specializing in educational undersea films and international travelogues available on video and DVD.

In a texas town with neither a Dairy Queen nor a stoplight, you might not expect to find authentic Italian food and wine.

In honor of our fabulous February issue, our magazine staff brainstormed inspired options for Cupid's list. We came up with terrific food, fantastic getaway options and, of course, jewelry!

By Casey Kelly Barton

As a native Texan mama, I want my kids to have a sense of place and a decent knowledge of regional plants and wildlife. One way to approach that is to start, if not at the beginning, then as close as we can get. With that in mind, I took the hub and both sons to UT's Texas Memorial Museum today, over nine-year old Rocketboy's grumblings that he couldn't possibly learn anything new because he's already been there twice. Upon arrival I handed him my iPod with the museum's audio tour on it, escorted him downstairs to a roomful of Texan fossils, and watched him start eating his words with gusto.

By Susan Tomlinson

What to do when you see a train wreck about to happen? Keep your mouth shut and let people make their own mistakes, or butt in and look like a pushy, insufferably superior know-it-all?

Just the other day, I was standing in the bird seed aisle of a local store when this same sort of advice pickle came up. I’m busy loading up my cart with a couple of bags of seed, when a couple of women arrive—all a-bustle—and start picking out a bird feeder and the seed to go in it. It was clearly their first feeder. I knew this because I was eavesdropping like any nosey parker worth her salt should. I’m not going to go into all the details here, but it was immediately apparent that they were headed down the Path of Regret.

Pinning Bob Phillips down long enough to do an interview and take photographs is like trying to catch a jackrabbit in an open pasture. The 35-year host of the syndicated TV program Texas Country Reporter is always on the move.

You can’t do a show about traveling the back roads of Texas while sitting in an office. At least, you can’t do it well. And Phillips and his crew of producers and photographers have done it well enough to make Texas Country Reporter the longest-running syndicated television program in broadcast history.
 

Holiday lights put you in that festive mood. And Texas has so many varied displays, you could plan a daytrip every weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Pick your favorite mode of transportation and there’s a holiday light tour for you. Take a walking tour through Austin’s month-long Zilker Park Holiday lighting display. Drive down the stretch of Highway 290 between Austin and Houston, where multiple ranch lighting displays east and west of Giddings. In San Antonio, you can stroll or cruise through The University of the Incarnate Word’s annual Light the Way display.

When the novelty of the new school year begins to wear off and hectic schedules start eating into family time, try “agricultural entertainment”—agri-tainment, for short. What’s that? The chance to enjoy wide, open spaces where the air is sweeter and time takes on a lazy tempo. It’s where you’re encouraged to stop and smell fresh-mown hay as hawks make lazy circles overhead.

If you've got a Saturday and a taste for wine, shopping and the great outdoors, hop on Interstate 35 and head north to a town settled comfortably between Dallas' big city mien and Fort Worth's laid-back country manner.