The Oasis on Lake Travis started as a hamburger stand. In 1982, Houston entrepreneur Beau Theriot bought 500 acres of ranch land perched above the lake with no grander plan than a small burger joint to serve the view. More than four decades later, that idea has grown into what’s billed as the largest outdoor restaurant in the country, a sprawling, Tuscan-inspired village of terraced decks built into a cliff 450 feet above the water, with a capacity to seat as many as 2,500 people across more than 40 separate patios and dining levels.
Somewhere between the fishmonger hurling a forty-pound salmon over your head and the ferry horn cutting through the fog on Elliott Bay, Seattle stops feeling like a city you’re visiting and starts feeling like one you’ve always sort of known. It’s a place built on contradictions that somehow work: a coffee-obsessed, tech-money city that still closes up early, a waterfront town that hosted the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the same hotel a decade apart, a fine-dining institution that once served burgers from a drive-in when the power went out and didn’t miss a beat.
Four days is enough to get a real feel for all of it: enough time for a ferry ride, a fish market, a splurge dinner, and at least one 2 a.m. burger stop you won’t be able to fully explain to people back home, and won’t want to.
Horseshoe Bay Resort is about to prove for the thirteenth summer in a row that a lakeside golf resort in the Texas Hill Country can throw one of the state’s better country music weekends. Beer By The Bay Music Festival returns August 7 and 8, 2026, two nights of live country music, Texas craft beer tastings, and an all-you-can-eat, chef-prepared spread set against the shore of Lake LBJ.
The Blanco River runs low and green past Wimberley Square on a Friday afternoon, cypress roots gripping the bank like they’ve been holding on since before the town had a name. Ninety minutes south of Austin, an hour past the last billboard for anything, the Texas Hill Country stops performing for tourists and just starts being itself. Wimberley and San Marcos sit close enough together to share a weekend without either one feeling like an afterthought, one built for slowing down, the other for cooling off. Together they make one of the easiest escapes in the state, a five-hour drive from Dallas that rewards every mile of it.
The sand at Daytona Beach is packed hard enough to drive a car on, which tells you almost everything about the place before you even unpack. This is a beach town built on speed and salt air in equal measure, twenty-three miles of white shoreline running alongside a boardwalk that still smells like fried dough and sunscreen the way it has for a hundred years. It’s louder than the quiet barrier islands further south, and that’s the whole point.
Every neighborhood should be so lucky as to have its history hold the best corner. In Deep Ellum, that corner is 2551 Elm Street, where the Knights of Pythias Temple has stood since 1916, designed by William Sidney Pittman, Texas’ first Black architect and son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. It was the first commercial building in Dallas built by, for, and with the money of Black citizens, and for more than two decades it served as the social heart of Black Dallas — its top-floor ballroom hosting dances, graduations, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, its lectern held by the likes of George Washington Carver, while out on the street below, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly were turning Deep Ellum into the blues capital of the Southwest.
Today the building carries its architect’s name as The Kimpton Pittman Hotel, and it remains the best argument in town that a building can change jobs without losing its soul.
The fog is still sitting on the water at seven in the morning, and the pier disappears into it about halfway out. A man in waders walks the tide line with a bucket, looking for clams the way people here have for a hundred years. By ten the fog burns off, the pier reappears all 1,200 feet of it, and the smell of butter and clam broth starts drifting up Pomeroy Avenue.
Picture this. The sun is dropping fast over the Pacific, going from gold to copper to something close to red, and you’re sitting on a cliffside terrace with a cold drink, watching the light hit a 200-foot rock arch rising straight out of the sea. Below you, two oceans meet — the Pacific on one side, the Sea of Cortez on the other — and the line where they collide is visible from where you’re sitting. Pelicans work the thermals. A whale surfaces maybe a quarter mile out, exhales a plume of white mist, and slides back under. The waiter arrives with something involving good tequila and fresh lime. You are at the edge of the Baja California peninsula, and this is a Tuesday.
