Over the next month or so, the school year is going to be winding down for students around the state. How to spend time off during the summer is a question parents and kids struggle with every year.
Luckily, the folks over at Texas Highways have put some thought into this. In their latest issue, a team of writers mapped out some of the best, most scenic road trips in the Lone Star State.
Dina Gachman is an author and contributor to Texas Highways and she was on the team that put the list together. She joined the Texas Standard to discuss.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Texas Standard: Let’s talk about your primary contribution to this list. You have a road trip here that begins in Fort Worth. You grew up in Fort Worth, did you not?
Dina Gachman: I did, from birth until third grade when we moved to Houston. But yeah, Fort Worth, I always consider my hometown.
So, what is your core recommendation if you happen to find yourself up and around the Fort Worth area?
So mine is a little bit of a nostalgia trip for me because when we first started talking about this idea of weekend drives, I started thinking about Sunday drives, which people don’t tend to do anymore — for some good reasons, some not good.
And so my drive was from Fort Worth, from my grandparents’ old house on Modlin Avenue, which has been reconstructed. And from Modlin Avenue at my grandparents house, out down Camp Bowie and towards Mineral Wells.
So when I used to do these Sunday drives in my grandfather’s Chevy Stepside, we would sometimes go to a family friend’s farm or just kind of drive.
But I went to Mineral Wells from Fort Worth and it was great. I mean, it was, you know, I couldn’t remember where the exact farm was, but I went to the town and kind of hung out there for a while and I loved it.
Mineral Wells. I tend to think of that as the home of a product known as Crazy Water. Am I right?
Yeah, it was known and still is as, you know, having healing waters.
And so there’s even a place called the Crazy Water Hotel that you can visit, which is really cool. That was started in 1925.
There’s the Baker Hotel, which is being reconstructed, which I think it’s even worth looking at now. It’s just this massive building, but it is known as a healing place. And I think they’re trying to kind of bring that back.
I guess celebrities back in the day — like we’re talking the 1930s and ’40s — used to come out to Mineral Wells and hang out, get their spa treatments in those healing waters.
Oh yeah, the celebrities would go and they would perform sometimes, I think.
So I think like Frank Sinatra went out there and — fun fact — supposedly my grandfather in the ’40s had this big band himself. So supposedly he played there. So I’m trying to track that down.
Tell us a little bit about some of the other getaways that are part of this list for summer weekend road trips.
Yeah, the reason these are cool is they’re just unexpected. It’s not the typical trip that people would take.
So one that I definitely want to take is by a writer, Danielle Lopez. And she grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, but she never drove the length of it. So she takes two days to drive the entire length of the Valley. And it just sounds like an amazing trip.
She goes from a town called Roma, ends up in South Padre, but there’s butterfly centers and birding centers and towns that sound amazing. So that was one that definitely caught my eye.
So Nick Patoski took US-83, so he went through towns like Shamrock, which has the tallest water tower in Texas, Childress… He saw some really cool kind of roadside attractions, like a giant green Brontosaurus. So that one was interesting.
And then Addie Broyles went from Austin and kind of a little bit similar to me, it was kind of a nostalgia trip. She recreated a motorcycle trip she would take with her uncle and sometimes her dad into the whole country to Luckenbach and Albert.
There’s some cool stuff for people who want to get out this summer and just take a casual trip.
The idea of a road trip seems like it’s solid gold for a magazine called “Texas Highways.” What makes a good road trip, is it about the destination or is it about the journey?
I definitely think it’s about the journey and the stops and the things you discover along the way — you know, the little cafe you didn’t know was there or the old coffee or new coffee shop or like the roadside attractions that some of these people saw.
It’s definitely all about being able to stop along the way rather than just rush to the destination.
How do you prefer to travel? Do you prefer to go with a bunch of people or do you just get in and go solo?
I think usually with a couple people is fun because then you can kind of experience it together and have somebody to talk to.
But if it’s a quicker trip — like mine was about a day — then that was kind of nice alone because I could just be with my thoughts and listen to what I wanted to and you can kind of just have some good alone time.
Do you think the road still lures folks the way that it used to?
It’s funny because like I say in the piece that I wrote, these Sunday drives used to be a huge deal. When my mom was little, they would go on Sunday drives and now because we have a million screens and distractions and gas is expensive and there’s more traffic, I don’t think there’s that allure like there used to.
But there’s so much in Texas to see that can actually take you right back to that place. In the past, that is the reason people did this. I think it’s worth exploring, but I don’t know if it’s as popular.
