2025 Travel Season: Texas & The Southcentral
This year, our travel season looks a little different. We’re not planning a months-long road trip or big national park circuit. Instead, this is the year we bring the Travel Season home!
We’re calling it Travel Season 2025: Texas & The Southcentral, a season built on mini road trips, state park days, city walking tours, sunset cocktails, and dinners at local places we’ve driven past a hundred times but never stopped to try.
The idea of bringing the Travel Season home is a shift we didn’t see coming, one born from a new job and a simple question: What if we stopped waiting until we were leaving to explore where we live? (Any chance you can relate to this? Here’s where this idea first came to be.)
This year is about planning the way we always do, but letting that guide us through the cities, trails, restaurants, and roadways of the area we call home. We believe the Travel Season isn’t just about where you go, but about how you live, so this is our chance to put that to the test!
Waiting Until You Leave to Explore Where You Live
We don’t know why we do this, but maybe you can relate. We wait to explore where we live… until right before we’re supposed to leave.
There’s nothing like an impending moving date to light a fire under your feet. Suddenly, the local hikes you’ve ignored for years or the museum you've driven past a thousand times feel urgent. You have to squeeze in a few “we-must-do-this-before-we-go” outings, all while tripping over moving boxes.
For us, it’s a familiar pattern. Jon grew up in Virginia Beach and rarely went to the beach. Kelly lived in Maryland and hardly ever took the two-hour road trip to Shenandoah National Park. Together, we lived in Houston, but only made it to the Space Center, Museum District, or Waterwall when friends came to visit.
We often say “next weekend,” because when something is always available, it’s easy to put it off, stay home, and watch Netflix. Exploring can wait. But then all of a sudden, it’s time to move on for someplace new, and we realize how much we missed.
But What If We Could Bring Travel Home?
What if we could bring the things we love about travel—the exploration, the excitement, the motivation to go and do—into our everyday lives?
What if Travel Season didn’t have to mean a month-long escape or a cross-country road trip? What if it could also be a mindset… a choice to engage more fully with the place we live?
One of the things we love most about our travel seasons is the way they shift our priorities. During those 2 to 4 (once, 6!) months on the road, something changes. We let go of the pressure to get everything done and instead prioritize things like:
Doing something new
Planning an adventure
Enjoying a long dinner
Waking up early for sunrise
Spending the day outside
Trying a new restaurant
Taking photos just for fun
Yes, we still work full-time, pay our bills, and handle what’s necessary. But we don't plan doctor’s appointments in the middle of Travel Season. We don't spend weekends running errands or rearranging furniture. We don't spend our evenings catching up on laundry or stress-scrolling through Amazon reviews to replace a broken lamp.
It’s a vacation mindset layered over everyday life, and we love it!
So… What Happens When You Can’t Travel?
Our plans changed this year. Jon took a new job that required him to show up in person, five days a week. At first, we panicked, wondering if this was the end of the Travel Season and the end of an incredible five-year chapter that has made us feel most like ourselves, both individually and together.
There was fear in giving up something that brings us so much joy, but then, a new idea started to form: What if the Travel Season came home?
What if we approached this next chapter like we would a typical travel season? What if we planned it, prioritized it, and treated our own state with the same excitement and curiosity we bring to any new place?
On the road, we learned how to bring the comforts of home with us while traveling for months at a time. Now, we’re learning what it means to travel at home, and create adventure in our own backyard.
“Travel Season” Is a Feeling
Over the last five years, the Travel Season has become as much a feeling as a trip. It’s fun. It’s freeing. It’s a shift in priorities and the decision to do the things now, not someday.
We’ve always said this about being a Road Trip Local: What if we could blend the new with the familiar until you’re someone who makes a lot of places feel like home?
Well, now we’re choosing to make home feel like travel and we hope you’ll join us! You can follow our local adventures, or read what we’re learning about bringing the Travel Season home:
How We Turned Travel Into a Lifestyle (Even at Home)
How to Turn Your Hometown into a Bucket-List Travel Destination
How to Be a Tourist in Your Own City
The Cabin Chronicles Continue
At the end of 2023, we bought a fixer-upper property just outside Yellowstone National Park. Since then, our lives have included a steady rotation of cabin projects, trips to Montana, and figuring out how to run a short-term rental from 1,200 miles away.
If 2024 was the year we dove headfirst into that new adventure, 2025 is the year we start to see parts of the vision come together. We hosted our second rental season and continued working on improvements across the property. One of the most exciting moments was bringing The Wolf’s Den to life!
For the full behind-the-scenes story of renovating and running cabins outside Yellowstone, you can follow along in The Cabin Chronicles, where we document the whole rollercoaster.
Local Adventures
Even though we’re staying close to home this year, we still managed to sneak in a few trips along the way. Because our schedules now revolve around holidays and time off from work, our travel calendar looks a little different than it used to. Long road trips have mostly been replaced by long weekends, holiday trips, and shorter getaways we can plan around work.
It’s a more traditional vacation schedule than we’ve had in years, but it’s been fun finding ways to make the most of it. Here are a few of the trips that shaped 2025.
Halloween Weekend in the Ozarks
In October, we met up with friends for Halloween weekend in the Ozarks. This trip was less about sightseeing and more about spending time together. We stayed in a cabin, enjoyed the fall scenery, and spent most of the weekend catching up, cooking meals, and hanging out. We also took a day trip to Big Cedar Lodge and found some gorgeous fall foliage hikes!
Fall at Caddo Lake
In mid-November we took a short trip to Caddo Lake State Park, right on the Texas-Louisiana border. Caddo Lake looks completely different from most landscapes in Texas. The lake is filled with flooded bayous, tall cypress trees, and Spanish moss hanging from the branches. It’s one of the most unique places we’ve visited in the region.
We spent the day paddling through the channels and exploring the maze of waterways that make up the lake. It was a peaceful trip and a good reminder that some of the most interesting places are closer to home than you think.
If you’re curious about visiting, we’ve shared more details in our guide to Caddo Lake State Park: Dallas to Caddo Lake State Park: A Fall Weekend Itinerary
A Very Merry Thanksgiving: Oklahoma City & Tulsa
Over Thanksgiving, we road tripped north to Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In Oklahoma City, we spent time around downtown and Scissortail Park, a large urban park that stretches through the center of the city and connects many of OKC’s main attractions. We also explored parts of Bricktown, walked along the canal, and enjoyed a festive stay at The National Hotel. (Definitely a highlight from the year!)
From there we continued about two hours northeast to Tulsa, following the iconic Route 66. Tulsa has one of the best collections of art deco architecture in the United States, along with a revitalized downtown filled with restaurants, breweries, and historic buildings. It also has the most incredibly decorated restaurant I have ever seen for Christmas.
If you’re curious about planning a similar trip, here’s how to plan your own Very Merry Thanksgiving: OKC and Tulsa Road Trip Itinerary
Be sure to consider driving Route 66 between the cities: Route 66: Best Stops between Oklahoma City and Tulsa
Christmas in Gardiner
We spent Christmas in Gardiner, Montana, staying at our cabins just outside Yellowstone’s North Entrance.
Winter is a very different experience in Yellowstone. Most park roads are closed to regular vehicles, but the Northern Range between Gardiner and Cooke City stays open year-round, which makes it one of the best places to see wildlife in winter.
The town of Gardiner is quiet this time of year, but that’s part of what makes the season special. Snow covers the mountains, steam rises from Mammoth Hot Springs, and the pace of everything slows down.
For us, the highlight was simply celebrating Christmas at the property we’ve spent the last two years renovating. We decorated the cabins, enjoyed time in Yellowstone, and took a moment to appreciate how far the project has come since we first bought the place two years prior.
If you’re curious about visiting Yellowstone in winter, we’ve written several guides that walk through what the experience is really like:
Related Posts
Our 2023 Travel Season was one for the books, covering 6400 miles (just counting mileage between stops), 11 US national parks and 5 CA national parks, and 30 different towns and cities we called home for anywhere from 1 to 21 nights.