This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue. View the full issue here.
Think Texas is all about ropin’ and ridin’ and not much else? Southern Texas offers experiences that take you from prairie to art museum, and from beach to high-tech space lab and beyond.
Start in Houston at Hotel Zaza, an über glam spot that’s a world away from a rugged ranch house. Filled with funky contemporary art and photography, the ZaZa is a favorite haunt of the rich and famous, who choose specialty suites in the Magnificent Seven Collection. Although we didn’t rise to that rarified level of accommodation, we did tour them and loved the massively swanky “Houston, we have a problem” suite, which features a life-size astronaut suit.
Houston offers everything from Hermann Park, an enormous green space filled with trees, flowers, ducks and a reflecting pond in the city’s heart, to the famous Space Center Houston, where you can live out your astronaut dreams, and the excellent Museum of Natural Science, filled with everything from Egyptian mummies to a creepily fascinating section on strange manners of death and even a flutter-filled butterfly conservatory.
A fave spot is Meow Wolf Houston, an immersive visual art center. Locally focused installations celebrate the music, art and people of the city in a wild series of multi-dimensional visual and experiential art pieces. They’re designed to operate like a gaming stage, where you travel, view and touch your way through an old-school radio station into a creatively explosive other world. You have to experience it to understand.
Galveston: History and Coastal Charm
South of Houston, the small island of Galveston offers a complete change of pace. Check into the Grand Galvez Hotel, a landmark property that oozes elegant southern charm. Have a drink in the speakeasy-style bar and linger over breakfast in the sunny restaurant, all to vintage music that transports you back in time.
Laid-back and beachy, Galveston invites you to learn about Texan history at the Bryan Museum. Or dive into Black history and art at the NIA Cultural Center in the place where Juneteenth was born and the last enslaved people were freed following the Civil War. At Ship to Shore, a clever interactive museum, step into the shoes of immigrants who sailed vast oceans to come to America, and then tour a working tall ship.
The island has an amusement pier with a ferris wheel, rides and a wealth of great restaurants – many featuring the famous Gulf shrimp – but don’t miss Riondo’s Ristorante for the best Italian food this side of Rome. You’ll love the freshly made tender pasta, gorgeous sauces, and the all-encompassing hometown welcome.
Moody Gardens: Entertainment for Everyone
Last stop, Moody Gardens – a vast entertainment complex with a hotel, amusement park, rainforest pavilion, and perhaps most importantly, an aquarium pavilion, where you’ll lose your heart.
There, in addition to the turtles, fish, sharks, stingrays and other creatures that are indigenous to the area, lives a small but remarkable colony of penguins. Born in captivity rather than taken from the wild, these lovingly tended birds are there to create understanding and respect for sea creatures and the watery world they inhabit.
If you’re lucky, you’ll meet one. A happy penguin will waddle up, straighten his black-feathered shoulders, stick out his little wings, point his head skyward, and welcome you to the flock with a joyous hooting honk … and that is when the heart-theft happens.
Corpus Christi: Wildlife, Culture, and Beaches
While you’re still in ocean-mode, drive to Corpus Christi’s Texas State Aquarium. We hit flamingo mating season, perfect for watching amorous males snap their heads from side to side as they search for the hottest pink females. Love on long legs.
Get a taste of culture at the Art Museum of South Texas and then taste something else – the fabulous Mediterranean cuisine served waterside at Elizabeth’s restaurant, overlooking the USS Lexington, a restored WWII naval ship open for public tours, escape rooms and flight-simulation adventures.
Corpus Christi also has its beachy side. So spend a day walking Whitecap Beach and an evening at Doc’s, where the GlowRow team will take you on a magical nighttime kayak tour, complete with lighted boats and paddles. Wrap up your Corpus adventures with a seafood feast at the Market Street Oyster Bar, trying all the Gulf shrimp, oysters and redfish your plate can hold.
Who knew a South Texas holiday could put such a focus on sand, surf, history and culture? Yeehaw!
For more information on vacations in Texas, visit TravelTexas.com
This article originally appeared within the Spring 2025 issue. View the full issue here, or browse all back issues in theCRACKYL Library.
