Great Escapes
Bored with the same old weekend jaunts? Whether you want to live it up or chow down, get close to history or away from it all, we’ve got your dream destinations. They’ll take you out of town—and out of the ordinary.
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But Glen Rose has much more to offer than just a fossilized version of small-town Texas—real fossils, for example, at the Somervell County Museum on the square and in Dinosaur Valley State Park, where you can stand in pleurocoelus, iguanadon, and acrocanthosaurus footprints in the Paluxy shallows. Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, a drive-through park, allows you to get up close and personal with giraffes, wildebeests, rhinos, and several species of antelope. Sculptor Robert Summers, whose work includes the cattle drive in front of Dallas’ city hall and the John Wayne statue at the Orange County, California, airport, is the son of a former Somervell County judge; some of his works are in the collection of the Barnard’s Mill Art Museum two blocks west of the square. Dining options range from local favorites like Hammond’s B-B-Q to prix-fixe gourmet meals at the Inn on the River and Rough Creek Lodge.
I arrived in Glen Rose on a Friday afternoon in April with the eldest and youngest of my three teenagers, Janet and Barrett, in tow, somewhat under protest. But their complaints ceased when we pulled up at Big Rocks Park on the Paluxy. A pile of flat-topped boulders rose from the streambed over the top of the bank. I watched them climb down to the ribbon of water and splash happily. Afterward we drove around the town. Most of the homes and businesses are old and modest structures, as befits a community that was among the poorest in Texas for many years.
Then, in the early seventies, came the event that changed Glen Rose forever: Texas Utilities decided to locate a nuclear power plant five miles north of town, and suddenly the county had jobs and tax revenue and a railroad track. Today the frame houses and small family businesses have been joined by sparkling new facilities built with public funds, among them a huge air-conditioned expo center, an amphitheater for concerts and plays (including The Promise, a musical version of the life of Christ that attracts large crowds on summer weekends from June through October), and a public golf course (a second is under construction).
Helen Kerwin greeted us at Country Woods, the bed-and-breakfast where we were spending the weekend. A former mayor of Glen Rose, she is now a county commissioner, and she gave me the lowdown on the town’s history. Country Woods sprawls over forty acres bounded by the Paluxy on one side and hills on the other. It includes the main house, where she raised her three daughters, and several cottages, among which are two of the oldest homes in Glen Rose, which she moved there and restored. We stayed in the Cabin in the Woods, nestled against a hillside several hundred yards from the main cluster of buildings. It came with two TVs, a VCR, tapes, a generously stocked kitchen (microwave popcorn, chilled wine, and soft drinks), and Madeline, the resident cat. After a satisfying dinner at the Inn on the River, a 22-room B&B with a conference center and a cozy restaurant, we went back to the cabin, where Janet grabbed two quilts and announced that she was sleeping outside on the deck, and Barrett plopped down in front of the VCR.
The next morning, Helen served us a sumptuous breakfast of sausage casserole, fresh fruit, and homemade cranberry muffins on our deck, then we headed for Fossil Rim, in the hills southwest of town. We took the Behind the Scenes Tour, which meant that we had a driver and got to go off the main road into the “intensive wildlife management area,” for a closer view of cheetahs and wolves and Attwater’s prairie chickens, with their yellow eyebrows and throat sacs. Fossil Rim takes in endangered species and tries to breed them and in some cases return them to the wild; some species are all but extinct in nature and may spend their lives here or in zoos. The irresistible appeal of the park, even for normally blasé teenagers, is that you can feed the animals, and they don’t need much coaxing to approach your car. You are likely to find yourself surrounded by greater kudu and addaxes or encounter a giraffe stretching his neck in your direction. (On hot summer days the best times for viewing wildlife are early in the morning and late in the afternoon.)
The tour took three hours, and by the time it was over, we were ready to head for the Paluxy and Dinosaur Valley State Park. On the way we passed the Creation Evidence Museum, located in a pink metal building, but its challenge to evolution and the fossil record had to wait for another day. The state park has three areas of dinosaur tracks in the river’s limestone bed. At first glance they were indistinguishable from other depressions and fractures in the limestone, but on closer inspection it was easy to pick out the ones with three toes (thought to have been made 110 million years ago). Alas, the best tracks were removed 62 years ago by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where they remain today. If the Greeks and Egyptians can demand the return of their temples, why not Glen Rose?
I knew better than to drag Janet and Barrett to the art museum, so I left them at the park to wade in the clear river, which was not much deeper than the three-toed footprints, while I went back to town. From the museum’s windows, I could see Barnard’s Mill, the oldest structure in town, and the gunports from which early settlers could fire at raiding Indians.
We cooked at the cabin that evening and fed apples to one of Helen’s horses that grazed nearby. As night fell, we sat on the porch and watched a violent thunderstorm miss us to the north. Insulated by the woods, we could hear no sound except the wind in the trees and an occasional rattle of thunder. It could have been a hundred years ago. Paul Burka
We’d like to spend some time on the water
but without the hassle of crowds.
For those of you who thought you had to travel to the mountain rivers of Colorado or Wyoming to enjoy the lovely, archaic sport of fly-fishing, we take you now to, of all places, the Llano River in the Hill Country, where a stunning blond angler named Raye Carrington awaits you. An ex-Austinite and a bridge-playing buddy of Ann Richards’, Carrington happens to be one of the country’s most well-regarded fly fisherwomen—in fact, a fishing-rod company has signed a deal to put her name on a new line of fly-fishing rods—and she is so devoted to Texas fly-fishing that last October she opened Raye Carrington on the Llano River, a fly-fishing retreat near the town of Mason, about a two-hour drive west of Austin and north of San Antonio.
Note that I said “fishing retreat.” This isn’t your basic fishing camp where men sit around in their undershirts drinking beer and cleaning fish and telling lies. For one thing, the twenty-acre property looks like something out of a Martha Stewart fantasy. About one hundred yards from the ever-gurgling river, Carrington has built or refurbished a couple of tin-roofed cabins (one is a converted barn) and an expansive main house with a glorious tree-shaded porch and feeders and water gardens nearby that nourish an assortment of native and migratory birds. The five guest rooms, which sleep two to four people each, feature Southwestern-style cedar furniture and down comforters on the queen-size beds. What’s more, all the rooms come with small refrigerators, coffeemakers, books on angling and Texas history—everything except telephones and televisions.
The fact is that many of Carrington’s visitors come here just to relax, to read, to pet her dog and cat, and to stare out at the spring-fed Llano River, one of Texas’ last wild rivers, the water rolling over granite and limestone, with sand and gravel bars that make for easy wading. These visitors take day trips to Fredericksburg for shopping or they tour the Eckert James River Bat Cave just outside Mason—and in the evenings they head off for a steak dinner at the old-timey HooDoo Cafe in nearby Art (population: 2), whose owner, Randy Gaulding (he’s one of the two residents; the other is a budding novelist), features live music or western movies two nights a week at the Art Feed Store next door.
But you’re nuts not to try the fly-fishing. For $75, the always-encouraging Carrington will give you a thorough two-hour lesson in fly casting. She provides all your equipment, and she’s such a good teacher that by late morning you’ll be able to hit the river alone, casting for perch and Guadalupe and largemouth bass, your silvery fishing line whipping back and forth above you in a beautiful arc. To be honest, you might not catch anything your first time out. It’s one thing, Carrington says, to be a good fly caster and another thing entirely to know which flies to use and where to send them on the water to bring in the fish. And if you don’t keep practicing, you’ll quickly forget everything that Carrington taught you. But who cares? This could be the best chance you’ll ever have to pretend, at least for a little while, that you’re Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It. S.H.
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