Why Texas is the perfect vacation destination

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching the news repeat itself, your colleagues assume you are lying in a hammock being brought pina coladas.

As a vacation destination, Texas comes far behind Florida and California, but we feel at home there

But I have been lucky in one way: not so much because I have been to a few exotic places for free, but because of the places I discovered which I might never have visited at my own expense. Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Bern come to mind. None of these is obscure – I’m not one of those people who wants to live among Amazonian tribesmen; I like a bit of room service. But they are all stunning places which sit below that threshold where the volume of tourism is so high that it is impossible to see how the locals lead their everyday lives, or where everything is so prepackaged that you can’t make a surprise discovery. The clue here is the hotel breakfast: if most of the people around you aren’t tourists, it’s a good sign.

The goal in this type of travel is not to see famous things you already know about – it’s to discover little-known things which are surprisingly good (I stumbled on the Temppel-iaukio Church in Helsinki completely by chance). There is something a bit Potemkin village about being a tourist anywhere where the principal industry is tourism. After two days on a cruise I would start to go insane and demand a tour of the engine room or something, just to see behind the scenes. Bordeaux, for instance, gives you a much better idea of French city life than Paris does. Being a major university town, it’s also more fun.

If you like this kind of thing, here are three massively underrated places to go. One is Scandinavia, where you can chat freely to the locals as they all speak perfect English. As a TV executive once told me, explaining the success of Scandi noir: “To the British, the Scandinavians are just the right amount of weird.”

Another is Germany. I’m in luck there, in that my wife speaks fluent German (in fact, if she cut her hair really short and bought a ridiculous pair of spectacles, she could pass for a native). Germany has a higher incidence of interestingness than France, and yet for some reason attracts a fraction of the tourists, perhaps because people, as with Scandinavia, assume it’s expensive. It really isn’t.

My third is Texas. As a US vacation destination for Europeans, it probably comes far behind Florida, California and so on, but strangely it is a place where we (perhaps more than non-Texan Americans) instantly feel at home. The food is spicily to our taste, and they drink like us as well. I have just returned from five days in San Antonio and cannot recommend it too highly. The locals are unfailingly kind, courteous and generous with their time. The place manages to be insanely large, hugely prosperous and modern, yet charming and rurally friendly at the same time.

My uncle once visited a Texan ranch where the owner herded steer across some vast acreage by helicopter. He would then land, sit in front of the TV, turn on the agricultural cable channel and watch reruns of One Man and His Dog.