The list keeps growing. The picks stay opinionated.
5 picks from Houston.
Four nights on a 34-mile barrier island where the Gulf meets the Laguna Madre. Sea turtle season runs May through September. The birding is better than the beach bars, but the beach bars earn their place after a day on the water. Stay at Isla Grand for the balcony that faces both.
Three nights on the Texas coast for the breakfast tacos, the Selena mural, and a barrier island with 60 miles of sand you can drive on. Corpus is the Gulf trip Houstonians take when they want seafood that tastes like the water it came from, not the cruise port most people think it is.
Five hours by car to a city that runs on its own clock. Breakfast at 11am after the second-line parade you followed for six blocks. Oysters at a marble counter where the shucker knows your face by day two. A hotel on Magazine Street where the morning coffee comes with beignets that aren't from Café Du Monde.
Three hours west on I-10, you're in a city that thinks it's cooler than Houston and might be right. Breakfast tacos that cost $4, a hotel pool designed by a real architect, and a Saturday night on Rainey Street that ends at 2am at a food truck that wasn't there last year.
An hour from Houston, a 19th-century port town with architecture that survived the hurricane and seafood that tastes like the Gulf it came from. The Strand at sunset, oysters at Gaido's, a hotel on the seawall that understands what a beach weekend should cost.
