Texas RV Travel blog

Everything is big in Texas, right? Even the sculptures and the gardens in which they are displayed are Texas-sized. Below are a few of the outstanding outdoor sculpture gardens and exhibits you will find in Texas.

The Benini Foundation Galleries and Sculpture Ranch
377 Shiloh Rd, Johnson City, TX 78636 • (830) 868-5244
Benini.com

The sculptures of Benini are accessible by driving or walking. Open daily. All events and tours are open to all, free of charge.

The Eyfells and Eyfells Foundation
9068 Highway 290 East, Fredericksburg, TX 78636 • (830) 990-9309
EyfellsandEyfells.com

Ten acres of sculpture and galleries of paintings located near the Wildseed Farm. Open daily. Free.

Texas Sculpture Garden
Texas Hall Office Park, 6801 Gaylord Parkway, Frisco, TX
Texassculpturegarden.org

Largest private accessible collection of contemporary Texas sculpture. Outside artwork is viewable dawn till dusk. See the interior artwork from 9am to 5pm, Monday-Friday, and Saturday, 9am to noon. Free.

Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street, Dallas, TX 75201 • 214-242-5100
Nashersculpturecenter.org

An indoor gallery and outdoor sculpture garden to display the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection of pre-Columbian as well as works of contemporary American artists. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am–5pm. Adults $10, 65+ $7, students $5, children 12 and under free.

Umlauf Sculpture Garden
605 Robert E. Lee Road, Austin, TX 78704 • 512-445-5582
Umlaufsculpture.org

Indoor exhibits and outdoor garden features 150 works by Charles Umlauf. Open 10am-430pm, Wednesday-Friday; 1-430pm, Saturday and Sunday. $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for seniors, $1 for students; children under 12 free.

Liberty Hill International Sculpture Park
Liberty Hill High School, 13125 W. Hwy 29, Liberty Hill, TX 78642
libertyhill.txed.net/sculpark/index.htm

In 1976, Mel Fowler, a sculptor who lived in Liberty Hill, gathered 20+ internationally recognized sculptors, including nine from foreign countries, to produce sculptures for the Texas Bicentennial. The 26 pieces of sculpture are located on ten acres next to the high school.

The Cullen Sculpture Garden
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Montrose Boulevard and Bissonnet Street • 713-639-7300
mfah.org/sculpturegarden/sculpture.asp

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), architect of the garden, was also active as a sculptor and designer.
Open daily from 9am-10 pm. Admission to the is free at all times.

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You might see sculpture anywhere else in Texas, too: along a pathway by Town Lake in Austin (Stevie Ray Vaughn statute), on the university campus at Texas A&M (Victory Eagle), outside a museum in Amarillo (huge model of helium molecule).

Other sculpture include three cowboys on horseback and 70 longhorn steers in downtown Dallas, an airfield on some anonymous Pacific island complete with animatronic WWII soldiers in Fredericksburg, the original Iwo Jima sculpture outside the Iwo Jima Memorial Museum in Harlingen, Stonehenge and Easter Island heads outside Kerrville, and the huge statute of Sam Houston outside Huntsville.

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Our last trip home took us through Lockhart where I managed to take some pictures of the wonderful Caldwell County Courthouse. We also saw beautiful courthouses in Bastrop and Giddings, but, as usual, my camera was in the trailer and I was in the van.

This is a picture of the top of the courthouse. This style of this courthouse is Second Empire, from the time of Napoleon III of France. The style has a mansard roof.

I applied a soft filter to the above picture to take the cars out of the picture.

Texas has some wonderful courthouses. If you are interested, the Texas Historical Commission has a list of the historic courthouses in Texas. You may find a list of Texas historical courthouses sorted by style on Texas Courthouse.com website.

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When we were traveling home from Lake Conroe, we just had to stop for two more nights. We hate the end of a road trip, so we usually wind up extending our trips. This trip, we stayed just south of Giddings at a nice RV park on Highway 77.

Ross’ South 40 RV Park is also a working Longhorn cattle ranch. The park is new place, but the owners are nice and the RV spaces are shady, long and widely spaced. With our Good Sam Club membership, the cost was only $18 per night for a full hookup.

They have a pool and a clubhouse. Plans include wi-fi, restaurant, bar and store.

They had a large pond that was off limits to guests. They raise Longhorns and that is their watering hole.

The pond emptied into a series of gullies that funneled it to the waterfall and then recycled it to the pond. It was a very peaceful environment.

Here is the back 40 where the livestock was usually just out of camera range. The Longhorns came up to the house in the evening, but I was caught without my camera.

This was a wonderful park and if you are going to be in the area, which includes Brenham, Round Top, Lake Somerville, LaGrange, Smithville and Bastrop, this is the place to stay.

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After the Roman Empire devolved into the Dark Ages, barbarians sacked and burned the cities of the civilized world. As the libraries, the temples and the churches burned, the collective history and the great scientific and mathematical advances of past civilizations went up in smoke.

Meanwhile, a Roman living in Britain named Patricius was captured and taken to Ireland. He escaped from slavery to become a priest. He returned to Ireland, bringing with him the word of God and the knowledge of the ancients. Thus, Ireland became the sanctuary for the thoughts and dreams of Western civilization.

Patricius founded a network of seminaries and libraries in Ireland that protected, preserved and advanced the knowledge that had been lost everywhere else. Patricius died long before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. His legacy, however, lived on in the Irish intellectuals who became known after the Dark Ages ended.

These learned Irish–girded with the knowledge of the ancient world, bearing illuminated manuscripts written by hand, and with the intellectual fervor of scholars–went forth to spread the word of God and to plant the seeds of scholarship that later founded great universities in Paris, Oxford, Rome and Bologna.

Did you guess that Patricius was later to be known as Saint Patrick? Not all Irish are drunken louts in green hats wearing Kiss Me * I’m Irish buttons?

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Click on the picture to see larger image. It does appear that one of them just told a good one. This was from our trip to Lake Conroe.

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