Texas

Texas asks to be taken in stages, because no single road can hold it. Its cities alone could fill an itinerary: Austin, the live-music capital where the hills meet the tech towers and the bats pour from beneath the Congress Avenue bridge each dusk; San Antonio, where the Alamo and the River Walk braid Spanish colonial memory into a modern downtown; and the twinned metropolis of Dallas and Fort Worth, one all glass ambition, the other still keeping its stockyard swagger alive with daily cattle drives.

The Gulf-facing south and east bring their own weather and their own tempo. Houston sprawls vast and humid, an unruly, cosmopolitan giant of energy and space exploration, its museum district and food scene rewarding anyone willing to drive between them. In the Hill Country to the west, Fredericksburg keeps its German heritage in its bakeries and vineyards, a genteel counterpoint to the bustle of the big cities, with peach stands and dance halls scattered along the back roads.

It is out west, though, where Texas turns strange and sublime. Marfa floats on the high desert plain, an unlikely art colony where minimalist installations share the horizon with mysterious lights, while the vast emptiness of far West Texas builds toward two great parks. Big Bend National Park guards a wild bend of the Rio Grande, its canyons and Chihuahuan desert some of the least-trodden country in the Lower 48, and the Guadalupe Mountains lift the state’s highest peaks from the desert floor. Along the border, El Paso presses against Mexico, a bicultural city where two nations blur into one long dinner.

To cross Texas is to feel scale as a physical fact. The distances are real, the myths are worn like well-loved boots, and the reward is a landscape generous enough to contain every version of itself at once.