Let’s go on an adventure this first week of January– to Texas. Western Texas, to be exact, with its desert valleys and wooded mountain slopes, a place where old Texas (with its guns drawn) meets sophisticated Texas (holding a glass of wine) in an area called The Hill Towns.

What I loved most on my drive through West Texas was the old Texas. Let me tell you something you might not know: you can open a bar just about anywhere in Texas. Got a T-shirt shop? You can have a bar in your T-shirt shop and if one of your patrons buys a beer, he can walk right out the door with it when he’s done shopping.

They have a bar inside Whole Foods in the big cities. You can walk around with a glass of wine while you’re digging for the best bunch of organic Swiss chard.

We were driving through West Texas last week and we stopped at an antique store in a town called Shiner, so stuffed to the gills with merchandise you could hardly open the door. And sure enough, there were four little bar stools at a counter in back where you could order up a glass of wine or have a beer.

My husband and I got to talking to an old man named Jim who’d spent a good part of his life working at the local brewery. He was in chatting with the pretty girl who was both shopkeeper and bartender. He talked up a storm with us as we sipped a beer with our elbows on a counter crowded with some of the sale items: figurines of ferries and funny note cards and plastic ice cube trays in the shape of pistols.

There was a sign above our heads with a picture of a gun that said, “We don’t call 911.”

Jim told us, during sixty minutes of uninterrupted dialogue, that he had his first glass of whiskey when he was ten, served to him at his uncle’s big river house down south somewhere.

And Jim knew everyone in town because there aren’t a whole lot of people to know. We were treated to the crazy stories of small town life in Texas — this little town called Shiner we were in, half boarded up, but so filled with charm it was easy to look past the imperfections.

If you turn your car North in Shiner and go a few hours up the road, you’ll find small towns like Comfort or Fredericksburg where they’ve taken Texas and shined it up so much, it’s like a cross between old Texas and Rodeo Drive in Hollywood.

Two handsome brothers with upscale cowboy clothes stand behind the bar with their arms crossed at their cool little place called The Vaudeville. Their logo is a pair of antlers, just so you know you’re still in Texas.

This is Fredericksburg, smack in the middle of a region called the Texas Hill Country, it’s scenic hills dotted with small sophisticated towns, two-lane roads, wildflowers, peaches, and farmers markets. There’s music festivals, chili cook-offs, and roadside barbecue pits, but make no mistake: John Wayne would not be happy here in this hidden oasis of The Lone Star State.

Imagine him stumbling into a town in Hill Country for a beer, only to find himself smack in the middle of a winery, holding a glass of Merlot by the stem, grabbing for a cracker topped with caviar.

Believe it or not, you’re still in Texas here, with its designer boutiques and upscale cabins and restaurants serving beautiful $25 burgers.

You might, at this point, want to head down to San Antonio, which is the sort of place you might bestow a first place ribbon to in the “Wow!” category.

If you want to talk about a place that has played up its best attributes, found great uses for old buildings and put together funding to build up or renovate public spaces, then look no further than San Antonio.

Their 15-mile River Walk is a masterpiece, with old buildings once built by the Spanish housing restaurants and shops — the true heart of downtown, surrounded by beautiful trees and little colored lights dangling from the branches.

When the Pearl Brewery closed more than a dozen years ago further down the river, the city bought the complex, full of 1930s Art Deco buildings. The grand old buildings now house innovative shops and world-class restaurants that are beautifully styled with old wood and industrial light fixtures. The green spaces between buildings are all for the public: kids playing games, a weekly farmers market, a blue grass band or food trucks. The new Culinary Institute Of America sits in the middle of it all and the students serve up crepes outside on a Saturday.

There’s a lot going on in good old Texas and a lot has changed, but if you dig deep, you’ll see that freedom still rings loudly here.

They still love their guns and their beer.