The Texas flag was designed in a town ten minutes from the resort. This is the land side of a lake trip, and it is the half most visitors never get around to.
The Texas flag was drawn in a small town most people have never stopped in, about ten minutes from the resort. That is the sort of place Montgomery is, and it explains why a day spent here feels different from a day spent on the water.
You will find a wide range of outdoor activities and places to explore in Montgomery, Texas. While you are looking for things to do near the resort, plan to spend some time in the Historic Downtown Conroe area for shopping and dining. Attend the Renaissance Festival or go hiking in the Sam Houston National Forest. Lake Conroe is the ideal destination for boating and jet skiing on warmer days. This guide stays on land, because the town side of the area is the half that visitors most often miss.
Montgomery started life as the Lake Creek Settlement and was chartered in 1837, less than a year after Texas independence. It was incorporated as a city in 1848, and its first school opened in 1839. Through the 1850s a building boom produced a run of fine homes, a number of which are still standing.
The claim the town is best known for is the flag. President Mirabeau B. Lamar commissioned Dr. Charles Bellinger Stewart, a Montgomery resident, to design a national flag for the Republic of Texas. The result, red, white and blue with a single inset five pointed star, was officially adopted in 1839. Stewart's original drawing, signed by Lamar, is held at the State Archives in Austin, and a copy is kept locally at the NH Davis Pioneer Complex and Museum. In 1997 the Texas House of Representatives formally commemorated Montgomery County as the Birthplace of the Lone Star Flag.
The practical version of all this is a walkable historic district with preserved nineteenth century buildings, a museum that holds the flag material, and the New Montgomery Cemetery, established in 1868, where Stewart is buried. An hour and a half covers it comfortably. It is a genuinely pleasant walk rather than a dutiful one, and it pairs well with lunch.
Conroe is the larger town on the other side of the lake, and its downtown has been steadily restored into something worth an afternoon. The draw is a compact grid of independent businesses rather than any single attraction, which makes it better suited to browsing than to a checklist.
What you will find there:
About thirty minutes west in Todd Mission sits something considerably larger than its rural setting would suggest. The Texas Renaissance Festival has run since 1974, when it drew 33,000 people in its opening year. It now exceeds 500,000 visitors annually, with a peak of 679,000 in a single season, making it one of the largest events of its kind anywhere.
The grounds cover roughly 55 acres with more than 200 additional acres given over to camping. Across a season of eight weekends in October and November, nine different themed weekends rotate through, including Oktoberfest, Pirate Adventure, Highland Fling, All Hallows Eve and Celtic Christmas. On site there are around 25 performance stages, roughly 500 costumed performers and more than 350 shops, with demonstrating artists working medieval trades including glassblowing, armor forging and candle making. The jousting, the birds of prey show and the closing fireworks are the anchors most visitors build their day around.
Arrive at opening rather than midmorning, because parking and entry queues grow steeply through the day. Wear shoes you can walk several miles in. Pick two or three scheduled shows and let everything else happen around them, since trying to see all of it guarantees seeing none of it properly. And book accommodation early, because festival weekends move the needle on availability across the whole area.
The forest wraps around the northern end of the lake and offers the kind of outdoors that is genuinely rare this close to a major city. The Lone Star Hiking Trail runs through it and is the longest continuous hiking trail in Texas.
Most visitors should not attempt anything ambitious. Choose a trailhead, walk out for forty five minutes to an hour, then turn back. That gives you the pine forest, the quiet and the wildlife without any of the planning a through hike would demand. Go early in summer, carry considerably more water than you expect to need, and use insect repellent. The trail also connects, in places, to the undeveloped upper shoreline of the lake, which is the most peaceful water access in the area.
Trying to combine all of this in one day produces a lot of driving and not much enjoyment. Two better shaped options:
Festival weekends are their own category and should be treated as a full day on their own. Whichever shape you pick, the return trip is short. The resort sits between the lake and the town, which means neither half of the area is more than a short drive away, and the location and directions page covers the routes.
Small town Texas food is one of the quieter pleasures of a trip like this, and it works best when you stop treating it as a search for the single best restaurant and start treating it as a set of different things worth trying once.
Barbecue is the obvious category, and the rule that holds almost everywhere is to go at lunch rather than dinner, because the good places sell out and the meat that has been sitting longest is not the meat you want. Beyond that, the historic districts in both Montgomery and Conroe carry independent cafes, bakeries and sit down restaurants, and the difference between them and anything on a highway frontage road is substantial. Seasonal farmers markets fill in the gap on weekend mornings.
For evenings when nobody wants to drive again, the resort carries several rooms of its own, from Lakeside Restaurant & Bar looking west across the water to a sushi restaurant on the second level of the lobby and a poolside grill inside the Aqua Park. The resort dining options page lays out which is which.
Antiquing is the area's genuine specialty, and it is worth going in with a plan rather than wandering. The dealers here skew toward American furniture, Texas ephemera, farm and ranch pieces, and mid century items, and the concentration of shops means you can realistically compare prices between three or four places within a short walk.
The Renaissance Festival does, particularly for popular themed weekends. The historic districts, the forest and the antique shops do not. Restaurants in Conroe and Montgomery fill on weekend evenings and a reservation is worth having.
The festival is built for families and holds children's attention better than almost anything else in the area. The historic districts work better for older children. The forest suits any age with a sensible turnaround point.
Spring and fall, comfortably. Both put the outdoor half of this list within reach, and fall overlaps with the festival season. Summer works if you front load the day and retreat indoors by midafternoon.
People book a lake and then spend the entire stay looking at water, which is understandable and also leaves a genuinely interesting piece of Texas unvisited ten minutes down the road. Montgomery is older than most of the towns around it, it has a legitimate claim on one of the most recognizable flags in the world, and it sits inside an easy radius of a restored downtown, a national forest and one of the largest Renaissance festivals anywhere.
Give it a day rather than an afternoon, and treat the driving as part of it, since the roads between these places run through pine forest and open country rather than suburbs. Then head back to the lake for the evening, which is a very agreeable way to finish. The wider things to do guide covers the water side of the trip, and current offers are worth a look if you are still choosing when to come.
