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West Texas is home to more than wide-open plains, oil wells and thousands of heads of cattle. It also is home to some of the nation's most distinctive small cities. Lubbock, Texas is not an obvious choice for a vacation destination, but if you like music, architecture, and good food for a quick, inexpensive vacation, it is worth the trip.
First-time visitors to urban areas sometimes worry that they will get lost. This will not be a problem in Lubbock. The city's terrain is level, thanks to its location on the Llano Estacado flatlands. This means that every street is on a clearly numbered grid, and navigating the city is a breeze. Most visitors will start out downtown, near the city's center, and work their way south through Lubbock's commercial districts to Loop 289, where many of the area hotels and shopping amenities are located. Texas Tech University, one of the city's major attractions, is just to the west of downtown.
Lubbock has produced a major amount of musical talent over the last few decades, despite of (or perhaps because of) its small size and geographical isolation. Buddy Holly, Delbert McClinton, Mac Davis and the members of the critically acclaimed country group The Flatlanders all originally hail from the Hub City. Many streets in Lubbock are named after musicians, and the city's musical heritage is a major tourist draw: the Buddy Holly Center, despite its small size, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year with its displays of the late musician's memorabilia and exhibits detailing Holly's influence on music worldwide. After visiting the Buddy Holly Center, you can take a walk through the Depot District, a restored vintage neighborhood full of art galleries, shops and restaurants.
Lubbock contains many intact examples of mid-20th century architecture. The city's downtown still has many of its brick streetlights and many of its older shopfronts and office buildings have been converted into locations for interesting ethnic restaurants and independent stores and other businesses. Many of the residential neighborhoods near downtown and Texas Tech University contain older historic houses dating from the 1910s into the 1960s, which reward those interested in seeing a more intimate side of Lubbock. If old-style ranching architecture is more your taste, the National Ranching Heritage Center is a must-see. One of the nation's top museums of Western ranching history, it features restored ranch buildings and a vintage railroad depot.
