Hill Country Travel Blog
Hit the Old Spanish Trail!
To hit this trail, you don’t need to saddle up or even lace your hiking boots. We’re talking about the Old Spanish Trail (OST) restaurant in Bandera, an honored local tradition for over 100 years!
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Comfort Texas Scarecrow Invasion
Every October, the townspeople and business owners in Comfort are invited, and encouraged, to take part in their annual Scarecrow Invasion..and they do so in some of the most creative ways imaginable. It’s a fun tradition that enhances community spirit, and one that has grown over the years to inspire smiles all over the Hill Country. One can easily imagine the hard work and inspiration that goes into the displays you’ll see everywhere in town...and we mean EVERYWHERE.
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Tuff, Texas
There are jokes about small towns in the Hill Country (and, in our travels, we’ve heard them in a lot of other places in the US, too). You’ve probably heard some of them: blink and you miss it; it’s just a wide spot in the road; they roll up the sidewalks at 8 o’clock every night; Sally Jones had twins and doubled the town’s population. It’s perhaps because of these jokes that we’ve found the smaller the town, the more proud people are to claim being from them. We’ll revisit that point in a minute.
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Hill Country Winter Weather: No Joke!
Snowbirds come here to enjoy the mild winters, and they start showing up the minute flakes start to fly where they live. They open up Facebook and laugh at their friends in Chicago or Minneapolis who are shoveling piles of the white stuff. “Thank goodness we don’t have that,” they assure themselves, wearing shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops in November. However….
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Meet the Twisted Sisters!
The term “Twisted Sisters” refers to the three state highways that make up the majority of a big, sweeping loop that’s nearly 200 miles: TX 335, TX 336, and TX 337. We’re going to trace out the route of the Twisted Sisters by starting at Bandera, which is a traditional starting point for many riders. We’ll trace it out in a clockwise direction. This is for ease of description on our part; you can start anywhere on the route and take in as much or as little as you’d like!
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CAMP WOOD, TEXAS: A LONG HISTORY, A LATE START
Located in western Real County, and on the western edge of the Texas Hill Country, is the small town of Camp Wood, Texas. One of the most fascinating aspects of this town’s history is that it can be traced back over a period of hundreds of years, but as an official town it’s not even a full century old! Let’s take a look at the people and events that made Camp Wood what it is today.
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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Medina?
Author John Steinbeck grew up near the Salinas River in California. He called the Salinas a “sometimes river,” because its levels varied so much from year to year. It would be little more than mud flats one season, and the next it would flood so violently that cattle and farms were washed away. Even as it frustrated the locals, Steinbeck said, it was their river, and they loved it as a part of them.
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Hill Country Colors: Leafer’s Paradise!
Chances are the average American thinks of New England when it comes to fall color, when the leaves turn from summery green to a rainbow of yellows, oranges, and reds. But our own beautiful Texas Hill Country puts on quite a show of its own! From roughly mid-October to mid-November, nature takes out her paintbrushes and carpets our hills and river valleys with brilliant colors that equal those of our neighbors to the northeast.
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