The Big Chill-Out
From city spas to rural retreats, we found the best places in Texas to relieve the stress of everyday life.
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Eating at Chain-O-Lakes requires no more effort than lake gazing. A horse and carriage will pick you up at your cabin in the morning to take you to a breakfast buffet at the Hilltop Herb Farm Restaurant, which is on the property. The Hilltop will also bring dinner to your cabin, and we’re not talking take-out. The staff sets up the table with white linen, candles, china, and champagne, and puts down more food than anyone could possibly eat—smoked salmon, boiled shrimp, Texas caviar, pasta salad, mangoes and raspberries, and homemade cookies.
The best time to go to Chain-O-Lakes is midweek (particularly during the summer); if you’re going on a weekend, make sure it’s not one of the few weekends when camping is allowed. You want to share this place with as few human beings as possible. Chain-O-Lakes, 713-592-2150. Small cabin, $85—$150 per night double occupancy.
You won’t have to share anything with anyone at two cabins deep in the southern Hill Country, near a place called Utopia. Happily, the name did not come about in a fit of civic boosterism. “Nirvana” or “Idyllic” would have worked just as well. Gumdrop-shaped peaks surround a valley of waving grasslands and dense live oak groves. Stately cypress trees, with leaves as delicate as down, shade the Sabinal and Frio rivers as they wind through limestone shelves and gather occasionally in turquoise-colored pools. Both cabins are completely private oases. My favorite is the Hideaway Cabin, which is part of the Bluebird Hill Bed and Breakfast. This rustic stone and wood building sits near a spring-fed swimming hole on Blanket Creek. The other cabin is across a county road from Bluebird Hill, on a nine-thousand-acre ranch. Part of Bear Creek Cabins, the building is called, appropriately enough, the Getaway Cabin. It is situated under a grove of pecan trees by a deep spot in Bear Creek that is filled with bass and perch. The main attractions here are stargazing, cooking out on the barbecue pit, and hiking the property, although Nancy Jones, who operates Bear Creek Cabins, worries that careless hikers could get lost on the vast property. But getting lost seems to be the whole point. Bluebird Hill Bed and Breakfast, 210-966-3525. $75 for two in the Hideaway Cabin, which sleeps six, plus $10 for each additional person; breakfast included. Bear Creek Cabins, 210-966-2177. $75 for two adults in the Getaway Cabin, which sleeps six, plus $5 for each additional adult; breakfast not included.
You could also get lost in Big Bend National Park, which has the state’s premier natural spa. The hot springs right on the Rio Grande are completely free (as they have been for most of the thousands of years they’ve been around), if not quite easily accessible, but that can be a plus. The unwinding begins with the drive, and on the drive to Big Bend there is nothing to distract you except the tumbleweeds that cartwheel across the road and the dust devils that shoot up from the desert floor like geysers.
Warm water bubbles up in several spots along the Rio Grande—heated geothermally to 105 degrees by igneous rock below the surface—but Big Bend’s hot springs, near the end of a dirt road in the southeast corner of the park, are the only ones open to the public. Indians were the original spa-goers, digging out a bathtub in the rocks, the better for stretching out in the water. In 1909 J. O. Langford filed a homestead claim on the springs, sight unseen, based on the word of a man he met in the lobby of the Alpine Hotel. Looking for a cure for his malaria, he built a stone cabin for himself and his family and a bathhouse around the springs and began charging a fee for a dunk. Eventually the rejuvenated Langford added a trading post and an eight-room motel. From 1944 to 1952 a local woman named Maggy Smith ran the place, and since the mid-fifties the National Park Service has maintained the springs as a historic site.
To get to the springs, you walk on a path that takes you by the beautifully preserved stone trading post, the less beautifully preserved motel, and some red Indian pictographs. Even though it was early morning when I arrived, six other people were already sprawling in the ruins of the bathhouse, which jut out into the Rio Grande like a crumbling jetty. I found a space for myself in the submerged foundation of the building, which has only one partial wall standing.
I lay back in the shallow water, and happily the rest of the spring dippers were respectfully quiet. All I heard was the low rushing of the Rio Grande. To one side of me were the rocky banks of Mexico; to the other, a cliff caught a brilliant blast of morning sun. The cool, arid breeze—which will dry you off before you can grab a towel—made the water feel even warmer. These are sights and sensations that every other spa is hard-pressed to match, and I found that several days of hiking then soaking my screaming muscles was the perfect tonic. Big Bend National Park, 915-477-2251.
You shouldn’t go out to West Texas without also cooling your jets at the most relaxing guest ranch in the state. Most guest ranches are set up to fill time with a flurry of activities—horseback riding, hayrides, cookouts, and the like. But Cibolo Creek Ranch, thirty miles south of Marfa, is not an ordinary guest ranch. First, it doesn’t look like any guest ranch you’ve ever seen, or any hotel for that matter. The owner, Houston businessman John Poindexter, pulled off a spectacularly meticulous renovation of three adobe forts originally built by West Texas legend Milton Faver in the 1850’s. The rooms are either in three mushroom-colored forts spread out over 25,000 acres of desert or in a new main house, called the hacienda, that was built in the same style—thick adobe walls, tile floors, and ocotillo cactus ceilings on long ramadas that allow dappled sunlight to fall on old Mexican benches.
You can ride a horse up to the mountaintops, but the best aspects of Cibolo Creek are those that encourage stillness. The courtyards of the main fort and the hacienda are crisscrossed by acequias, or stone-lined canals, that channel spring water from the source in a cottonwood grove to a comma-shaped pond below the buildings. My room was right on the courtyard in the hacienda, and I slept with my doors wide open and the wooden louvered shutters closed. I dozed off to the sound of water trickling, an unusual sound in the desert.
My favorite spot for resting was a small oasis at a spring near the hacienda, a fold of green in the khaki-colored hills. I made the fifteen-minute walk to the spot early in the morning, while the sun was rising up from behind a mountain. I sunk into the hammock hung between two cottonwoods and watched a blue heron land noisily in the top of a scrub oak. I listened to Mexican finches and mourning doves and the sound of a family of javelinas rooting around on the slope next to me. I was as tranquil as the Mona Lisa.
Meals at Cibolo Creek are relaxing too, with guests running through the kitchen pouring their own coffee, chatting with the chef, a woman who recently moved to West Texas from New York. When I was there, some guests had even brought their own food and cooked out on a grill near the pool house. This is probably one of the biggest joys of the place—that a hotel so beautifully decorated, so celebrated (it’s been written up in every major travel magazine, plus many decorating publications) can have such an unpretentious air. It gives you the feeling that this is actually your own house, but you didn’t have to buy it. Cibolo Creek Ranch, 915-837-5901. $275 per night double occupancy, meals included.
The only warning I can offer is that once you’ve sampled these places, they become addictive. No sooner are you back among stoplights and honking horns, no sooner has Peter Jennings told you about yet another corporate downsizing or terrorist bombing and you’re ready to head back. Which of course leads to the stress of trying to save up for the next trip. Will it never end?
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