A Texas Hill Country Family Road Trip Kids Will Actually Remember

Family road trips have a predictable failure mode.

Adults plan the itinerary around scenery, historic buildings and restaurants. The kids spend most of the trip asking how much longer they have to sit in the car.

The Texas Hill Country offers a better option.

Between Austin, Fredericksburg, Kerrville and San Antonio is a landscape full of swimming holes, limestone caves, old railroad tunnels and enough strange roadside objects to keep even a bored kid looking out the window.

You can see a homemade Loch Ness Monster swimming through a cow pasture. There is a nearly full-size Stonehenge beside the Guadalupe River. A three-story tower was once built specifically to house bats. Another abandoned railroad tunnel now fills with millions of actual bats every summer.

It is the kind of road trip where the drive itself becomes part of the entertainment.

Here is one way to build a family Hill Country weekend around the weird stuff.

Start With the Hill Country’s Fake Stonehenge

A sensible itinerary might begin with a museum.

This one begins with Stonehenge.

Just outside Ingram, the Hill Country Arts Foundation is home to Stonehenge II, a roughly 90-percent-scale recreation of England’s famous monument.

That alone would be strange enough.

Then somebody added two 13-foot Easter Island-style Moai heads.

The entire thing started when two Hill Country neighbors began experimenting with a leftover piece of limestone and eventually decided that Central Texas apparently needed its own Stonehenge.

For families, it works because there is almost nothing to explain beforehand.

Tell a child that you are stopping to see a giant fake Stonehenge with Easter Island heads beside a Texas river, and the attraction sells itself.

It is also the sort of stop that works well on a road trip because it does not require devoting half a day to it. Walk around, take ridiculous pictures, stretch everyone’s legs and keep moving.

Make the Roadside Oddities Part of the Game

One of the easiest ways to make a long drive more tolerable for kids is to give them things to look for.

The Hill Country is unusually good at this.

A useful guide to the weird Texas Hill Country roadside attractions maps out the region’s pasture monsters, giant fiberglass people, fake towns, old bat structures, odd cemeteries and other landmarks that are easy to miss if you do not know they are there.

Turn it into a scavenger hunt.

Who sees the giant cowboy first?

Can anyone spot Texas Nessie?

Which roadside object is the strangest?

The advantage is that several of the oddities require almost no additional time. They are things to notice while traveling between the larger stops rather than destinations requiring a reservation or admission ticket.

That makes them ideal for families traveling with children whose patience for formal sightseeing is limited.

Find Texas Nessie in a Lampasas Pasture

South of Lampasas on U.S. 183 sits one of the stranger pieces of Texas roadside art.

A rusty sea serpent appears to swim through a roadside pasture.

It is known as Texas Nessie.

The creature was assembled from old farm machinery and positioned so that sections of its metal body rise and disappear through the grass like a monster surfacing from water.

Except there is no water.

There are cows.

In tall grass, portions of the sculpture may disappear completely, which somehow makes the whole thing even better.

This is not an attraction with a parking lot or gift shop. It is on private property and should be viewed only from the road where it is safe to do so.

For kids, however, it provides exactly the kind of absurdity that makes a road trip memorable.

Spend Some Time in Fredericksburg

Not everything needs to be bizarre.

Fredericksburg works well as the center of a family Hill Country trip because it gives everyone a chance to stop moving.

The historic Main Street district is compact and walkable, with restaurants, bakeries, shops and enough activity to break up a driving-heavy day.

Parents may know Fredericksburg primarily for wineries, but families have plenty of alternatives.

The National Museum of the Pacific War is one of the strongest museums in the region for older children who are interested in history. Enchanted Rock is nearby for hiking, while the surrounding countryside provides some of the prettiest driving in Central Texas.

And if your children are primarily motivated by giant roadside objects, the Fredericksburg area has those too.

Along the U.S. 290 corridor east of town, roadside oddities include giant fiberglass figures, unusual sculpture and one enormous black bull known for an especially memorable party trick: reports describe red glowing eyes, smoke from its nose and bubbles emerging from the opposite end.

Nobody promised educational enrichment.

Watch Millions of Bats Leave an Abandoned Railroad Tunnel

This is the stop that turns a silly road trip into something genuinely spectacular.

South of Fredericksburg, Old Tunnel State Park protects a 920-foot abandoned railroad tunnel.

From May through October, the tunnel becomes home to a huge colony of Mexican free-tailed bats and cave myotis bats. Texas Parks and Wildlife says the population can reach roughly three million bats, with the largest numbers typically present in August and September.

Around sunset, the colony begins leaving the tunnel to feed.

Millions of bats spiraling into the evening sky is considerably more impressive than another hour in the car.

Families should plan this particular stop rather than simply showing up. Tickets are required for evening bat viewing, and Texas Parks and Wildlife recommends purchasing them in advance because space is limited. The upper viewing area accepts children of all ages, while children younger than four are not permitted in the lower viewing area because of the bats’ sensitivity to noise.

For older children, it is difficult to beat.

Drive Through Comfort and Look for the Bat Tower

The Hill Country has another bat-related oddity near Comfort, but this one is man-made.

In 1918, a roughly 30-foot structure known as the Hygieostatic Bat Roost was built east of town.

Its purpose was remarkably straightforward.

The designer believed bats could reduce mosquitoes and therefore help fight malaria, so he designed a specialized tower intended to attract and house them.

Think of it as an apartment building for bats constructed as an early public-health experiment.

The tower survives more than a century later and is now a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. It sits on private property but can be viewed from the road. HillCountryTowns.com’s current guide identifies it as one of the surviving pieces of strange Hill Country history.

For a child who has just watched millions of bats leave Old Tunnel, explaining that Texans once deliberately built a three-story bat house to fight mosquitoes should keep the conversation going for a few miles.

Go Underground Near Boerne

When everyone has had enough roadside attractions, head underground.

Cave Without a Name near Boerne offers guided tours through a natural limestone cavern filled with formations and large underground rooms.

The cave also has one of the best names in Texas.

According to the local story, a naming contest was held after the cave was opened to the public in the 1930s. A young boy submitted the idea that the cave was too beautiful to have a name.

So the Cave Without a Name got its name by supposedly not having one.

That contradiction tends to land particularly well with children.

The cave also offers a useful change of pace from outdoor Hill Country travel, especially during hot weather.

Do Not Overschedule the Trip

The best family road trips usually have fewer stops than the adults initially planned.

A practical two-day version might look something like this:

Day One: Drive toward Ingram for Stonehenge II, spend time around Kerrville or Fredericksburg, then end with the Old Tunnel bat emergence.

Day Two: Explore Fredericksburg in the morning, drive the back roads toward Comfort and Boerne, spot some roadside oddities along the way, then finish underground at Cave Without a Name.

You could easily add more.

You probably should not.

Children tend to remember one giant fake Stonehenge, one ridiculous pasture monster and several million bats more clearly than eight carefully scheduled historic sites.

Let the Weird Stuff Carry the Trip

The Texas Hill Country is already an easy place to build a road trip.

The roads are scenic. The towns are close enough together to provide frequent stops. There are rivers, caves, parks, restaurants and plenty of places to stay.

But what makes the region particularly good for families is everything that exists between the obvious attractions.

The homemade monuments.

The giant fiberglass people.

The abandoned structures.

The bat towers.

The objects sitting in fields for reasons nobody can adequately explain.

Those are often the things children notice first anyway.

Build the road trip around them, and you may discover that nobody asks, “Are we there yet?”

They will be too busy looking out the window.