These Affordable Texas Getaways Are the Coolest Places in the State, and Most Cost Under Ten Dollars

I counted the money in the coffee can twice before we left. Forty-one dollars and some change, most of it in quarters, and a tank of gas my brother had already paid for. We were seventeen and we were going to see Texas anyway.

We slept in the back of a hatchback outside Concan, ate bologna sandwiches on a limestone bank, and floated the Frio until our fingers went pruney. I have taken expensive trips since. None of them beat that week.

That is the thing nobody tells you about this state. The best of Texas is almost always gloriously cheap, and often free, because so much of it is canyon and spring water and river and street.

Below, discover twelve places I keep going back to, spread from the Panhandle to the Gulf. Most of them cost less than a fast food lunch. A few cost nothing at all. Every one of them is worth the drive.

1. Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Canyon

The road drops off the flat Panhandle so suddenly that the first time I drove it, I laughed out loud. One minute it is wheat and sky. The next you are switchbacking down into a gash of orange and cream and rust.

Palo Duro runs roughly 120 miles long and plunges around 800 feet at its deepest, which earns it the nickname the Grand Canyon of Texas. The famous bit is the Lighthouse, a slender rock pillar at the end of a six mile out and back trail.

Go early. The canyon floor holds heat like a cast iron skillet, and the light at seven in the morning turns those layers the color of a peach.

Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the road, the trails and the little stone cabins on the rim in the 1930s, and you can still rent those cabins today. Day use runs $8 for anyone thirteen and older, and kids twelve and under get in free.

Stay for the outdoor musical drama in the summer if the budget stretches. If it does not, the rim overlooks at sunset are free with your day pass and nearly as good a show.

Where: 11450 Park Road 5, Canyon, TX 79015

2. Garner State Park in Concan

This is the one from the coffee can trip, so I will admit my bias up front. The Frio River really is that clear. Bald cypress lean out over water cold enough to make you yelp, and the hills behind it are pure Hill Country limestone.

Then there is the dance. Every summer night, people gather on the concrete slab in front of the old concessions building and two step under the stars. Members of CCC Company 879 are said to have started the tradition in the late 1930s while they were building the place.

The park opened in 1941 and the jukebox has been running ever since. Fifty cents buys you a song, a dollar buys three, and for that dollar you get to pick part of the night’s soundtrack for everyone.

Did you know? You can rent an inner tube in the park and float the same stretch your grandparents did. Entry is $8 for ages thirteen and up.

Where: 234 RR 1050, Concan, TX 78838

3. Barton Springs Pool in Austin

My first swim at Barton Springs lasted about eleven seconds. I got in to my ribs, made a noise I am not proud of, and got straight back out.

Then I got back in, because everybody else was in, and after a minute it felt like the best idea anyone in Austin had ever had.

The pool is three acres of spring water sitting in the middle of Zilker Park, fed from underground and holding steady around 68 to 70 degrees no matter what the sky is doing. In August that is a small miracle.

It smells like wet limestone and cut grass. Pecans shade the south bank, the hill on the north side fills up with people reading, and somebody is always swimming laps with a serious face.

The endangered Barton Springs salamander lives here and nowhere else on earth, which is why the rules about where you can walk matter. Admission runs roughly $2 to $9 depending on age and residency.

Where: 2201 William Barton Drive, Austin, TX 78746

4. Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo

Ten Cadillacs, buried nose down in a Panhandle field, tail fins in the air, every inch of them wearing about four hundred coats of spray paint. It costs nothing. You park on the frontage road, walk through a gate, and there they are.

The art collective Ant Farm put them there in 1974. Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels designed it as a tribute to the rise and fall of the Cadillac tail fin, and eccentric Amarillo millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 funded it and lent the field.

The cars run in order from a 1949 Club Sedan to a 1963 Sedan de Ville. Marsh never fought the graffiti. He encouraged it, which is why the paint layer is now thick enough to peel off in curls like tree bark.

Pro tip: bring your own can and add a stripe. Then pick up the empties, because the field belongs to everybody.

Where: Interstate 40 frontage road near exit 60, Amarillo, TX 79124

5. Balmorhea State Park in Toyahvale

I did not believe the photographs until I was standing on the deck. You drive a long stretch of West Texas scrub, past not much at all, and then there is a 1.3 acre pool of clear green water sitting in the desert with fish in it.

San Solomon Springs pushes something like 22 to 28 million gallons a day through that pool, which is why the water needs no chlorine and never really warms up or cools down. It hovers in the low to mid seventies year round.

Bring a mask. You can snorkel here and share the deep end with catfish and the tiny endangered Comanche Springs pupfish, which is not a sentence I get to write about many swimming pools.

Civilian Conservation Corps crews shaped the natural spring into this pool between 1934 and 1941, lining it with native stone. Entry is $7 for ages thirteen and up.

Where: 9207 Highway 17, Toyahvale, TX 79786

6. The River Walk in San Antonio

Walking the River Walk costs exactly nothing, which people forget because of all the restaurants. You can spend a whole afternoon down there on the price of a paleta and come up at dusk feeling like you went somewhere.

It sits a full story below the street, so the traffic noise disappears and you get water sound and cypress shade instead. Stone stairways drop down every block or two, and the arched footbridges are the best free photograph in the city.

Architect Robert H. H. Hugman pitched the plan in 1929, when the city was considering paving the bend over entirely. He got his chance in 1938 with Works Progress Administration funding, and by March 1941 the crews had built 31 stairways, three dams and thousands of feet of new walkway.

They planted around 4,000 trees, shrubs and plants. Ninety years on, those are the ones dropping shade on your head.

My cheapest good day in San Antonio was a walk down from the Museum Reach, a bench near the Arneson River Theatre, and an hour of watching the barges go by.

Where: Downtown along the San Antonio River, San Antonio, TX 78205

7. Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods

I like Nacogdoches in the early morning, when the brick streets are still damp and the whole downtown smells like pine and coffee. It is the oldest town in Texas and it wears that lightly.

Don Antonio Gil Y’Barbo brought a group of settlers here in 1779 and set up a government in his stone house. A replica of that Old Stone Fort stands on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus today with an East Texas history museum inside.

The university keeps a set of gardens open to the public, the historic homes downtown are free to admire from the sidewalk, and the whole compact center is built for wandering without a plan.

Come in spring if you can. The azaleas take over, and the town runs a marked trail through the best of them for anyone who wants to drive it slowly with the windows down.

Where: Downtown Nacogdoches, TX 75961

8. Bishop Arts District in Dallas

Twelve or so walkable blocks in Oak Cliff, and I have never once managed to leave with an empty tote bag. This is the largest intact trolley era shopping district Dallas has, and it still feels like a neighborhood rather than a development.

The warehouses and shops went up in the 1920s, and by the 1930s the trolley stop on Davis was the busiest in the whole city. Artists moved into the old workshops in the 1970s, which is where the name came from.

Today more than sixty independently owned shops, galleries, coffee bars and restaurants fill those buildings. Murals cover half the brick, so the walking itself is the attraction and the walking is free.

My routine is a coffee, a slow loop for the murals, and a bakery stop I refuse to justify to anybody.

Where: North Bishop Avenue at West Davis Street, Dallas, TX 75208

9. Seawall Boulevard in Galveston

Salt air, a bike with a rattling chain, and ten straight miles of concrete between you and the Gulf. The Galveston Seawall is the longest continuous sidewalk in the country at 10.3 miles, and every bit of it is free to walk.

The beaches along it are public. There are around 220 free parking spaces on the north side of the boulevard, so with a little patience you can make a whole beach day cost the price of the sunscreen.

The wall itself is a monument. Construction started in 1902 after the Great Storm of 1900, and the city raised the grade behind it and put up a barrier standing 17 feet above sea level.

The best hour is early, before the boulevard wakes up. The seawall gets a light on it then that the postcards never quite catch, and the pelicans do their low glide right along the waterline.

Where: Seawall Boulevard, Galveston, TX 77550

10. Fredericksburg in the Hill Country

Fredericksburg smells like peaches in June and cedar the rest of the year. German settlers founded it in 1846 under an agreement negotiated by John O. Meusebach, and the street grid he laid out is still the one you walk today.

Look for the Sunday Houses, the tiny cottages farm families built so they had somewhere to sleep after the long wagon ride into town for church and market. Once you know what they are, you start spotting them everywhere.

Main Street shopping can run you whatever you let it, but the wandering is free. Marktplatz sits in the middle with lawn and shade, and in spring the roadsides out of town turn solid blue with bluebonnets.

My favorite cheap afternoon here is a bakery pretzel, a bench in the square, and absolutely no schedule.

Where: 302 East Austin Street, Fredericksburg, TX 78624

11. Caddo Lake State Park in Karnack

Caddo looks like a fairy tale somebody set in a swamp. Bald cypress rise straight out of the water in flooded groves, Spanish moss hangs off every branch, and the light comes through green.

The state park sits on the edge of it near Karnack, about fifteen miles from Marshall. From there you can put a paddle in and follow more than fifty miles of marked water trails through the maze, which is the only honest way to see the place.

Anglers come for more than seventy species of fish. Walkers get 2.5 miles of trail through the piney woods, and the Civilian Conservation Corps cabins from the 1930s are still standing and still rentable.

Push off at dawn and then stop paddling for a minute. Frogs, herons, a drip off the blade, and almost nothing else.

Where: 245 Park Road 2, Karnack, TX 75661

12. Big Bend National Park in Brewster County

Big Bend is the splurge on this list at $30 per vehicle, and that covers everyone in the car for seven straight days. Divide it across a family and a week and it turns into the best value in the state.

The park runs to more than 800,000 acres of desert, river and mountain. Santa Elena Canyon is the shot everybody knows, sheer walls closing in on the Rio Grande, and the trail to see it properly is short and mostly flat.

Up in the Chisos Mountains the temperature drops and the vegetation changes completely, which feels like cheating after the drive in through the creosote.

Then the sun goes down and the real attraction arrives. Big Bend has some of the darkest night skies in the lower 48, and on a moonless night the Milky Way throws a shadow. Bring a chair and stay out.

Where: 1 Panther Junction, Big Bend National Park, TX 79834

Fill the Tank and Pick One

Add it up and you can see what I mean. Eight dollars for a canyon, seven for a desert spring, nothing at all for ten miles of Gulf coast sidewalk or a field of buried Cadillacs.

The expensive part of Texas travel was never the destination. It is the hotel, the tickets and the restaurant, and every one of those is optional here. A cooler, a tent or a cheap motel, and a full tank will carry you a very long way.

So pick the one that made you sit up while you were reading. Check the park’s own page for hours and reservations before you go, because the good weekends do fill, then put it in the calendar while you still feel like it.

Whether you have lived here your whole life or you are just passing through on the interstate, this state will hand you something worth remembering for the price of a sandwich. Go find out which one is yours.

Featured image: Benjamin Cherkas via Palo Duro Canyon State Park