Panhandle Plain—and Posh

By nature, the low-key Panhandle Plains region distinguishes itself as a place that goes easy on your wallet. You’re hard-pressed to find big-budget options here; in fact, you’ll find yourself enjoying diversions that would be pricey indulgences in a big city. In other words, you’re guaranteed a wealth of affordable amusements. All you need is a good list of must-do, must-see distractions to reap the best this northwestern sprawl of Texas can offer. Here’s a sampling of options—both posh and plain affordable—when it comes to unwinding, dining, and overnighting.

Unwinding

Posh. Heading west from Fort Worth on US 180, one of the great routes for crossing the Caprock Escarpment, you’ll want to slow down for a spell in the town of Albany, which is rich in ways to kill time. The Shackelford County seat offers its lovely cream-colored courthouse as a visual feast for the eyes, but you’ll want to pull your attention away for a bit if you love good literature. Look on the northeast corner of the square for Lynch Line, a bookstore known for its sensational stock of Texana works in print, including folklore, history, art, the military, and other topics, not to mention maps and collectibles. Some of the volumes are first editions signed by the authors and can be expensive.

Around the corner, on the main drag, you can spend yourself silly on the spurs and boots, trendy clothing, sterling silver jewelry, Western home decor, gourmet kitchen items, and hunting gear at Blanton-Caldwell Trading Company, a longtime favorite shopping destination for week-end-trippers from Fort Worth.

Some 270 miles northwest, in Amarillo, you’re guaranteed an elegant evening at the dramatic new Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts. The $30 million facility, which opened early this year in the reviving downtown, serves as home to the city’s opera company and symphony orchestra, the Lone Star Ballet, and the Texas Country Music Series productions. The intimate setting and topnotch acoustics, combined with the building’s soaring architectural lines, have instantly made the performance hall the showpiece of the Panhandle.

Plain affordable. The Panhandle will easily slake your thirst for art-viewing-on-a-budget—all it takes is a visit to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, just a horseshoe’s throw south of Amarillo in the town of Canyon. The state’s largest and oldest historical museum—itself an Art Deco masterpiece—charges only $7 admission for adults, a steal when you consider the wealth of Texas art within its walls.

Among the holdings is the major portion of the immense art estate of former Dallas resident Frank Reaugh (1860-1945), long known as the “Dean of Texas Artists.’’ Reaugh, who became famous for his panoramas of West Texas cattle drives, created perhaps his most remarkable painting, The O Roundup Texas, 1888, in 1894 from sketches he had made six years earlier of 15,000 cattle grazing northwest of Fort Belknap. You’ll be awed by the detail in this work, one of 600 pastels and oils in the museum’s Reaugh collection. In all, the PPHM has about 6,000 pieces of fine and decorative art, including works from other Texas and New Mexico artists, which rotate among the museum’s nine galleries.

Getting a taste of Texas’ rough-and-tumble history is a snap at Frontier Texas!, a state-of-the-art facility that spreads over several acres in downtown Abilene. High-tech capabilities allow you to feel connected to the people who carved a life out of the wilds across the state by putting you in the midst of a herd of stampeding buffalo, a gunfight over a card game, Indian battles, and scary prairie weather. The museum, the perfect jumping-off point for wandering the 700-mile-long Texas Forts Trail, also has a gift store with Texana items, including books, toys, clothes, and home accessories.

See the full article in the September 2006 issue.

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