We visited Fredericksburg in January 2018 as part of our Big Bend Loop trip. Read about our first visit in 2016 here and our third visit in 2024 here.

Fredericksburg is a wee German-rooted town an hour west of Austin, and since we enjoyed our stay when we went through on our two years ago (!?) on our big trip, we decided to stop there for a night this trip to break up the drive from Austin to Alpine. Sadly, our favorite brewery there has closed, and we experienced mediocre-to-bad cocktails and food, but we once again enjoyed walking Bugsy around the cute downtown, and ended the visit on a good note with live music and cheap beer at an entertaining bar. See our first Fredericksburg post for much more on our eating, drinking, cultural adventures, and hiking in the area; we only had about 18 hours in town this trip so didn’t get to do much!

Campground

We stayed at Hill Country RV Park again, a short drive/Uber/Lyft (but not a safe walk or night-time bike ride, due to lack of sidewalks) from downtown. The campground is perfectly fine, but next time we’ll check out Fredericksburg RV Park–the trip from there to downtown is a bit shorter, and along more walkable streets.

Entertainment

Daytime

To get your bearings in Fredericksburg, your first activity should be walking the sweet little downtown area and checking out the shops (and restaurants for later). Fredericksburg is a very dog-friendly town, and Bugsy was able to go into many stores and even an art gallery with us. Fredericksburg is also beer-friendly–a couple shops have coolers with free Lone Star beer for patrons, and if you don’t finish while you shop, you can drink it while you walk down the street!

Nighttime

After dinner, we claimed spots at the small divey bar at long-time Fredericksburg restaurant/music hall Hondo’s and drank cheap beers while waiting for the live music to start. There was lots of good people watching, between the bachelorette parties and the two-steppers, and the band was great.

Eating and Drinking

Usually the eating and drinking categories have high priority in our posts, but I don’t have much interesting ingestion intel to share from our evening in Fredericksburg. We went to Elk Store Winery and Distillery for pre-dinner cocktails, and while I appreciate getting my money’s worth, our drinks were too strong… and the bartender took it upon himself to make J a drink different from what he ordered because he thought J would like it better. Um, he would have ordered it then? Strange.

We wanted to eat dinner somewhere on the downtown strip; Crossroads Saloon & Steakhouse was closed and nowhere else we peeked in grabbed us, so we prioritized beer over food and ate while watching football at the bar at Cultures Grill. They have a good beer selection, but the food is… uninspired. My salad was okay, but J’s schnitzel was terrible.

On the list for next visit: cocktails at The Treaty House. We were too hungry that night to have another round of cocktails before dinner, and after dinner it was beer time at Hondo’s!