Free for All
A tank of gas now costs as much as your first car. Your utility bill equals the gross domestic product of Luxembourg. But who says you can’t afford to have fun? We searched high and low for the best museums, meals, music, movies, and more that won’t cost you one red cent.
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ABILENE On Thursday evenings, visitors to the Grace Museum, including the Children’s Museum, can explore the rhyme and reason of Tot Spot; the Grace Space Station, with its VW Beetle spaceship; and “Recollections,” an interactive exhibit involving a huge psychedelic video screen. 325-673-4587, thegracemuseum.org
AUSTIN The renovated George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center is back with a freebie vengeance, offering programs like Smile on My Face, a photography and darkroom workshop for budding shutterbugs. 512-974-4926, ci.austin.tx.us/carver
The goal of the Saturday Morning Film Club at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar is not to numb your munchkins with yet another showing of The Little Mermaid but to tweak their cinemagination with classics like The Green Slime and King Kong. 512-476-1320, originalalamo.com
BEAUMONT Family Arts Days at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas brings more to the creative table than construction paper and paste. Think sugar skulls for el Día de los Muertos, shoe painting, self-portraiture, and the ever-popular making of paper flowers. 409-832-3432, amset.org
DALLAS Several times a year, the Meadows Museum, at Southern Methodist University, indulges its future patrons on Super Saturdays with storytelling in the galleries, live music and dance, art projects, and adventures. 214-768-2516, meadowsmuseumdallas.org
HOUSTON The acclaimed Children’s Museum of Houston gives it all up for zip on Thursday evenings. Kids can explore a replica of a Oaxacan village, milk a robotic cow in the “Farm to Market” exhibit, and discover the magic of pulleys by raising themselves five feet in the air. 713-522-1138, cmhouston.org
MIDLAND You may feel like Godzilla plodding through the “My Town” exhibit at the Fredda Turner Durham Children’s Museum, but your kids will feel perfectly proportional in this pint-size cityscape. 432-683-2882, museumsw.org
SAN ANTONIO For more than 35 years, Saturday Morning Discovery at the Southwest School of Art and Craft has paired art-hungry kids with professional instructors in a variety of media, from photography to textiles. 210-224-1848, ext. 321; swschool.org
NATURE
The most demanding attraction at Sea Center Texas, in LAKE JACKSON, is the three-hundred-plus-pound Queensland grouper Gordon—those basset hound eyes that lock on yours, those Charles Laughton lips, that shear mass! The big guy, who turned 21 this year, shares his 50,000-gallon aquarium with some equally intriguing tankmates, like the state’s largest moray eel, resplendent in toxically bright chartreuse and needle teeth. But don’t let these flashy showboaters completely overshadow the more subtle sea creatures, like the languid anemones at the touch tank, the smooth-sailing sting rays in the salt marsh aquarium, or the zillions of wee redfish at the hatchery. 979-292-0100, tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/visitorcenters/seacenter
AUSTIN Every Friday and Saturday when the University of Texas is in session, the Department of Astronomy hosts viewings of the cosmos through its vintage nine-inch telescope at the Painter Hall Observatory. On Wednesday nights you can take a gander at binary stars and a planet or two through the sixteen-inch telescope on top of Robert Lee Moore Hall. 512-471-5007, outreach.as.utexas.edu/public/painter.html
CLUTE You can while away hours at the Brazosport Museum of Natural Science by puzzling over its collection of 14,000 shells, the delicate and wacky masterworks of a bunch of soft-bodied mollusks who have no formal training, no dealers, no angst, and no tools or materials other than their own calcium-rich secretions. 979-265-7831, bmns.org
DALLAS Join naturalists for illuminating strolls along the ten miles of trails at the 633-acre Cedar Ridge Preserve, where you might stalk trout lilies or learn the basics of birding. 972-754-1755, audubondallas.org/cedarridge.html
OUTDOOR THEATERS
EL PASO’s Chamizal National Memorial (below) is the love child of a diplomatic solution to a border dispute between the United States and Mexico. It takes its mandate to “celebrate” the blending of two cultures to heart, and this summer marks the twenty-third anniversary of the Music Under the Stars concert series, where as many as 15,000 fans pack the amphitheater to listen to music by the likes of Tito Puente Jr. or the El Paso Symphony. 915-532-7273, nps.gov/cham/pphtml/events.html
AUSTIN The Beverly S. Sheffield Zilker Hillside Theater has been the bucolic setting for nearly five decades of Broadway musicals, Shakespeare productions, and dance performances. 512-477-5335, ci.austin.tx.us/dougherty/hillside.htm
HOUSTON The Miller Outdoor Theatre packs the calendar from March through November with performances by the Houston Ballet, the Ebony Opera Guild, and more. 713-284-8352, milleroutdoortheatre.com
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• You’re driving home after Thanksgiving on Interstate 10. Somewhere between Austin and El Paso you realize you’re sick of microwaved burritos and, even if you weren’t, you’ve spent your last nickel on gas. Now’s the time to heed the call of the pecan trees surrounding the Crockett County town square, in OZONA, where a nutritious snack is free for the taking. Sort of. First, you have to beat the squirrels to the bounty. Second, pecans are usually plentiful only every other year. And third, the Algonquins didn’t call them pacane—which means “nut too hard to crack”—for nothing. Once you’re in the foraging habit, you’ll notice that the state is lousy with this native treat.
• Are you an Internet-oholic? If so, stay out of AUSTIN, a major enabler ranked second in the nation for wireless connections. But temptation lurks across the entire state, with Wi-Fi hotspots popping up from Abilene to Wichita Falls. wififreespot.com/tex.html
• To earn the coveted title of Texas Master Gardener, you must complete a fifty-hour Texas Cooperative Extension course that covers the secrets of weed control, fruit production, lawn care, and other botanical challenges. Then you must complete another fifty hours of volunteer work, during which time you’ll get to flaunt your newfound knowledge. 979-845-8565, aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/mastergd
• Texas fish don’t want you to know about the Junior Angler and Advanced Fishing Clinic classes or the fly-fishing workshops taught by Texas Parks and Wildlife at various locations throughout the year. Largemouth bass, in particular, wish people would shut their traps about the free fishing (no license necessary, though park fees apply) at more than seventy state parks through the month of August. 800-792-1112, tpwd.state.tx.us/learning/angler_education/
• Considering the scenes of wine-samplings-gone-wrong in the movie Sideways, who could blame a winery for pulling the plug on free tastings entirely? Then again, how else can Becker Vineyards, in STONEWALL, hook you on its Viognier or Val Verde Winery, in DEL RIO, introduce you to its Don Luis Tawny Port? The Texas Department of Agriculture is the keeper of the list of wineries that have tours and tasting rooms. (Not all are free, so call ahead.) agr.state.tx.us/wine/index.htm
• Texans who are unable to read standard print because of visual, physical, or reading disabilities can borrow audio, large-print, and Braille books from the Texas State Library Talking Books Program, which includes 80,000 titles, from best-selling novels to biographies, and eighty-plus magazines. The books are delivered by mail to the patron’s door, and even the return postage is paid. 800-252-9605, tsl.state.tx.us/tbp
• The state’s free museums—from big-city contemporary to tiny-county historical—could sate a culture vulture for years. Thankfully, the Texas Association of Museums has information on hundreds of museums, some always free and almost all of which offer at least one admission-free evening a week. museumsusa.org/search/tx/
• You can forget picking up any free samples from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s Western Currency Facility, in FORT WORTH, but the 45-minute tour is an exquisitely cheap education on the moneymaking process. (Warning: Don’t try this at home.) 866-865-1194, moneyfactory.gov/locations/section.cfm/25/492
• Regardless of the weather, anywhere from twenty to a hundred participants—adults, children, even pets—show up at the Ridge Oak Drive scenic overlook, in AUSTIN, during the full moon for an hour of gentle stretching led by yoga instructor Charles MacInerney. 512-459-2267, yogateacher.com
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