Roadside Attractions in Blanco County
Texas·4 places
Education
Exotic Resort Zoo
The Exotic Resort Zoo is a family run animal park of one hundred and thirty seven acres off US 281, a few miles north of Johnson City, where zebras, camels, kangaroos, kudu, oryx and bison share the Hill Country pastures. It opened in 1995.
Education
Reptilandia
Reptilandia Reptile Lagoon is an indoor reptile zoo on US 281 just north of Johnson City, opened in December 2022 by a herpetologist who had already run a zoo of the same name in Costa Rica for more than two decades. Quetzal Dwyer grew up in New York, worked at a reptile zoo in the Canary Islands, and founded the original Reptilandia in Costa Rica before bringing the name to the Hill Country.
Education
Science Mill
Johnson City's science museum is built inside a mill that has changed trades several times since 1880. James Polk Johnson, who had founded the town the year before, built it as a steam grist mill and cotton gin. It became a flour mill in 1901 and a feed mill in the 1930s, and after it closed in the 1980s it was a restaurant for some years before it stood empty.
Quirky
The Blanco Bowling Club
The six lanes behind the cafe on Fourth Street in Blanco play nine-pin, a German game that survives commercially nowhere in the world except a cluster of Central Texas counties. The pins stand in a diamond rather than a triangle, the one in the middle is painted red, and teams of six bowl six frames instead of ten. Knocking down all nine pins scores nine.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
