Nacogdoches & the Piney Woods — Oldest Town in Texas, Caddo Mounds & El Camino Real

Tucked into the deep pine forests of East Texas, Nacogdoches claims the title of oldest town in Texas — a place with roots reaching back through Spanish colonial missions to the ancestral Caddo who built ceremonial mounds here more than a thousand years ago. Day one settles into the town itself: its red-brick streets, the leafy campus of Stephen F. Austin State University, and the largest azalea garden in Texas in full bloom of horticultural ambition. Day two goes deep into the region's layered past — a relocated village of nineteenth-century East Texas buildings, an early settler's home, the pioneer cemetery and site of Texas's first university, and, in nearby Alto, the sacred Caddo ceremonial mounds raised around 800 A.D. Day three follows the ancient El Camino Real de los Tejas to Mission Tejas State Park, where Spain planted its first mission in East Texas, before the long drive home through the Piney Woods.