September 16, 2024
The Texas Hill Country is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s gorgeous, in a unique way that I’ve never found anywhere else, and the people are even better.
For the fine folks at Wildsam, I put together a list of the best way to spend three days exploring this special piece of the state, from honky tonks to wildflowers to dance halls.
Here’s an excerpt:
Excepting boots, armadillos and longhorns, nothing screams Texas! quite as loudly as bluebonnets. The prolific little lupine, wrote historian Jack Maguire, “is what the shamrock is to Ireland, the cherry blossom to Japan … the tulip to Holland.” In the spring, bluebonnets paint the Hill Country, west of Austin and north of San Antonio, sharing the limelight with Indian paintbrush, firewheels, foxgloves and primrose. Cars swerve onto shoulders, hazard lights blinking, families piling out for photos. One Austin photographer charges $450 for a session of wildflower portraits with your dog. The blooms erupt from the same rocky soil that German immigrants tilled in the 19th century and that winegrowers coax vines from today. Rural highways wind through the Hill Country, following some of Texas’s prettiest rivers, surrounded by fields of yellows, pinks, whites, reds, purples and, of course, blues.