Fredericksburg

I did not believe Lia when she said we’d find a town in Texas where the bakeries sold proper strudel and the old-timers still greeted each other in a German dialect. But there it was, in the Hill Country west of Austin — Fredericksburg, with its wide limestone Main Street and its Sunday houses, and a bakery where a woman handed me a slice of apple strudel and said “grüß Gott” out of pure habit. As a European I found it uncanny and rather moving: a little corner of nineteenth-century Germany, transplanted and left to weather under the enormous Texas sky.

Main Street and the German bones

The heart of town is Main Street, broad enough to turn an ox-cart around, lined with sturdy limestone buildings the settlers built to last. We spent a whole morning drifting between them — a shop of local honey, a bookstore, a butcher selling venison sausage. In the middle stands the Marktplatz and the octagonal Vereins Kirche, a reconstruction of the settlers’ first communal church. Lia, who studied a little German at school, kept pointing out words on the old facades and grinning. The Pioneer Museum around the corner filled in the rest: the story of families who crossed an ocean and a wild frontier to build this improbably orderly little town.

Wine, peaches, and the Hill Country

Fredericksburg is now the center of Texas wine country, and the road east — Highway 290 — is strung with tasting rooms among the oaks and the rolling grassland. We are French, so we came ready to be politely unimpressed, and were instead genuinely surprised: the Tempranillos and Viogniers here have real character, shaped by the heat and the limestone soil. Between vineyards we stopped at the roadside peach stands, because it was July and the Hill Country peaches were at their peak — warm, dripping, impossibly sweet. We ate them over the steering wheel with juice down our wrists, laughing, the radio playing, the hills going gold.

Enchanted Rock at dawn

Our best morning was north of town at Enchanted Rock, a vast pink granite dome that rises out of the scrub like the back of some sleeping animal. We started up before the heat, scrambling over the bare stone as the sun came up, and near the top we had the whole thing to ourselves. The Tonkawa people believed the rock was enchanted, and creaked and groaned with spirits at night — geologists say it’s just the granite cooling and contracting, but standing on that bald summit with the Hill Country spread out endlessly in every direction, I preferred the older explanation. Lia sat with her knees to her chest and said nothing for a long time, which is her highest form of praise.

Getting There

Fredericksburg lies in central Texas, about 80 minutes by car west of Austin and roughly an hour north of San Antonio — both have major airports and make sensible gateways. There’s no train or bus service worth relying on, so a rental car is essential, both to reach the town and to explore the wineries and Enchanted Rock, which is about a half-hour drive north. Summer brings the peaches and the heat; spring brings the wildflowers along the roadsides. Book ahead on weekends, when Austinites pour in for the wine trail.