Frommer’s EasyGuide to Texas Hill Country. Edie Jarolim
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Frommer’s Star Ratings System
Every hotel, restaurant, and attraction listed in this guide has been ranked for quality and value. Here’s what the stars mean:
| Recommended | |
| Highly Recommended | |
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AN IMPORTANT NOTE
The world is a dynamic place. Hotels change ownership, restaurants hike their prices, museums alter their opening hours, and buses and trains change their routings. And all of this can occur in the several months after our authors have visited, inspected, and written about, these hotels, restaurants, museums, and transportation services. Though we have made valiant efforts to keep all our information fresh and up-to-date, some few changes can inevitably occur in the periods before a revised edition of this guidebook is published. So please bear with us if a tiny number of the details in this book have changed. Please also note that we have no responsibility or liability for any inaccuracy or errors or omissions, or for inconvenience, loss, damage, or expenses suffered by anyone as a result of assertions in this guide.
Mission Concepción, one of five historic Spanish missions open to visitors in San Antonio.
CONTENTS
Exploring Texas Barbecue
San Marcos
New Braunfels & Gruene
A modern cowboy keeps the spirit of the West alive in the Hill Country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edie Jarolim has worn many hats, including a sombrero on one-margarita-too-many nights. She got a Ph.D. in American literature from NYU and was an editor at Frommer’s in New York before she indulged her warm weather—and large living space—fantasies and moved to Tucson, Arizona. She has written about the Southwest and Mexico for a variety of major publications, including National Geographic Traveler, Sunset, The Wall Street Journal, and USAToday.com. She’s the author of three travel guides, one dog guide, and one memoir. See www.ediejarolim.com for more details.
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Arthur Frommer
1
Trips from San Antonio
San Antonio sits at the southern edge of one of Texas’s prettiest regions, the rising and falling dreamscape of lakes, rivers, and limestone caverns called the Hill Country. In the 19th century, Germans and Czechs, fleeing social upheavals in Europe and lured by the promise of free land, established several small towns here; other settlements go back to the region’s cattle-ranching past. Eventually, the Hill Country’s mild climate and abundant springs gave rise to health spas, summer camps, and guest ranches. Modern tourism, in turn, brought restaurants, shops, lodgings, and a resurgent wine industry.
Any of these towns makes an easy day trip from San Antonio; you might even be able to do two in one trip (stopping in Boerne, for example, on the way to Bandera). Fredericksburg has the most accommodations and things to see and do; it also makes a good base for touring the other towns and attractions, including LBJ country. For a full listing of Hill Country events, see the Travel Texas website: www.traveltexas.com/cities-regions/hill-country/events.
Most of the towns covered here lie northwest of San Antonio, but if you head northeast via I-35, you can also visit New Braunfels, Gruene, San Marcos, Wimberley, and other destinations detailed as day trips from Austin in Chapter 17.
Boerne
32 miles NW of San Antonio
From downtown San Antonio, it’s a straight shot north on I-10 to Boerne (rhymes with “journey”), located on the banks of Cibolo Creek. The little (2¼ miles long) town was founded in 1849 by freedom-seeking German intellectuals, including Jewish-German political writer and satirist Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), for whom the town was named. In the 1880s, Boerne became a popular health resort. It’s now the seat of Kendall County, with more than 16,000 residents. The Boerne Visitors Center, 108 Oak Park Dr., off Main Street (www.visitboerne.org;