Kerrville

Kerrville sits along the Guadalupe River in the heart of Texas Hill Country, a town of limestone bluffs and old bald cypress trees whose roots grip the riverbank like knuckles. Lia and I came in early June, which turned out to be exactly right: the Kerrville Folk Festival, running continuously since 1972, was in full swing at Quiet Valley Ranch just outside town, an eighteen-day gathering where songwriters camp for weeks and trade songs around campfires long after the main stage goes dark. We only caught two days of it, but two days were enough to understand why musicians talk about this festival the way pilgrims talk about a shrine.

The river and Louise Hays Park

Kerrville’s real center of gravity is the river itself. Louise Hays Park runs along the Guadalupe right downtown, with cypress-shaded lawns, a low-water dam that locals use as a swimming hole, and a footbridge where we watched teenagers jump into the current on a hundred-degree afternoon. We rented tubes nearby and drifted a lazy stretch of green water, the limestone bed visible clear beneath us, before dragging ourselves out sunburned and happy for barbecue in town.

Cowboy art and the Hill Country roads

Kerrville also holds the Museum of Western Art, a striking adobe-style building full of contemporary cowboy and ranching paintings and bronzes, which surprised us with how seriously it treated a genre we’d expected to find kitschy. Afterward we took the back roads out of town — Highway 39 toward Hunt, where the river forks and low crossings dip right through the water — past dude ranches, pecan orchards, and roadside stands selling peaches by the bushel. It’s the kind of drive with no single destination, just Hill Country unspooling mile after green mile.

Getting There

San Antonio International Airport is roughly an hour and a half southeast via I-10 and Highway 16, the most common way in for visitors. From Austin it’s about two hours west. There’s no rail or meaningful bus service to Kerrville, so a car is essential, and it pays off — the surrounding Hill Country towns of Fredericksburg, Bandera, and Comfort are all close enough for easy day trips.