A Texas State Campus Visit: An Hour-by-Hour Itinerary (Weekday Tours, Weekend Alternatives)

Guided tours at Texas State run Monday through Friday. That one fact settles more about a campus visit than anything else on your list, and it catches families out constantly, because touring a college feels like a weekend errand and the university does not run it like one.

So this is two plans. The weekday one is built around a booked tour and is what you want if someone can take a day off school or work. The weekend one is honest about what you cannot do on a Saturday, and makes a good day out of what is genuinely open.

A note on who is writing this. We are a hotel at I-35 exit 200, about fifteen minutes from campus, with no connection to the university beyond being where a lot of visiting families end up sleeping. We cannot book your tour or get you a parking waiver. What we can tell you is where these days usually go wrong, and it is almost always the same two things: parking, and the assumption that a campus keeps ordinary business hours.

Book the tour first, then build the day around it

Everything else is flexible. The tour is not.

Sign up through the university's admissions site, and do it early, because space is limited and advance registration is recommended. Two details are easy to get wrong at that stage. The San Marcos and Round Rock campuses take separate registrations, so make sure you are booking the one you actually want to see. And residence hall tours are included on San Marcos tours only, which matters a great deal if your student is weighing living on campus and not at all if they are commuting.

If the guided tours are full for your date, that is not the end of it. Walk-in self-guided tours are available as a fallback.

Here is what is not published anywhere we can reach: the tour start times, how long a tour runs, where it departs from, and whether there is a fee. That is why the clock below is a worked example rather than a schedule. Once admissions confirms your slot, slide the rest of the day around it. The booking hub points at the Alumni and Future Student Welcome Center, and TXST One Stop answers questions at 512-245-8978.

Parking is where the morning goes wrong

There is no free parking on campus. Not in the garages, not in the permit areas, not on a Tuesday morning when you are only there ninety minutes. The one exception is approved special events, and a campus tour is not one.

Pay-to-park garages are the easiest option for a visitor, the LBJ Garage among them. You pay by credit card on the way out, so bring one that works. Pay-by-app lots and metered spaces exist too, which means downloading something in a parking lot while your tour time approaches. The garage is the lower-stress choice.

Rates are not published online. The parking office takes calls at 512-245-2887 if you want a figure before you drive in.

Families visiting a student can ask about a parent permit, valid in any legal non-reserved space. That is worth the phone call if you are coming back repeatedly, or moving someone in, rather than making a single visit.

Whatever you choose, put twenty minutes of slack between parking and your tour time. Finding a garage on an unfamiliar campus, paying, and walking to a building you have never seen takes longer than the map says.

The weekday plan

Morning

7:15 a.m. Eat downstairs before you go. The free hot breakfast is here for exactly this kind of morning. A tour is a walking hour, and hungry teenagers ask no questions at all. Eating here also frees up lunch to happen downtown, which is a better use of the meal.

8:15 a.m. Drive over. About fifteen minutes in normal traffic. Normal traffic is doing a lot of work in that sentence on a weekday morning, when the interstate through San Marcos carries commuters and students at the same time. Leave earlier than feels necessary.

8:45 a.m. Park, then walk into the library. Get the garage sorted first, then head for the Albert B. Alkek Library at 601 University Drive.

9:00 a.m. The Wittliff Collections, before anything is crowded. Take the elevator to the 7th floor. Admission is free, and the weekday hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., which makes this the rare campus stop you can do before a mid-morning tour without rushing.

It is also a smarter first look at a university than a lobby or a brochure. The Wittliff is a working museum sitting on top of a working library, which means your student sees the building students actually use on their way to seeing the collection. The Lonesome Dove material is permanent. The other exhibitions rotate, so check what is showing before you go rather than promising anyone something specific.

Mid-morning: the tour itself. Your guide will be a student, which is the real value of the hour. Prepare two or three questions your student wants answered by somebody who lives it rather than by an admissions office, and save them for the walk. If your registration included the residence hall portion, that is the part people remember, and it is the part you cannot replicate on your own later.

Wear shoes you can walk in for an hour. This should not need saying and it does.

Afternoon

12:30 p.m. Lunch, downtown. Downtown San Marcos is the obvious lunch stop, and you will want the car to get there and back. We are not going to send you to a specific table on The Square, because we have not sat at enough of them to make a recommendation we would stand behind. Park once, walk the couple of blocks, and eat wherever looks busy at half past twelve. If you would rather eat closer to the hotel at the end of the day, our guide to where to eat near the outlets covers the places within a few minutes of exit 200.

2:00 p.m. Go back to campus without a guide. The unscheduled hour is worth more than most families expect. Walk a route the tour did not take. Read the flyers on a notice board. Sit outside a building your student would have class in and see whether they can picture themselves there in February, not just on a bright day in front of a guide. Nobody is selling you anything for this hour, which is precisely what makes it useful.

3:00 p.m. Spring Lake, if there is appetite left. The Meadows Center at 201 San Marcos Springs Drive runs glass-bottom boat tours over the headwaters of the San Marcos River, and it sits near campus. Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the last boat at 4:30 p.m.

That 4:30 is the number to plan against. If the tour ran long or lunch drifted, this is the block to cut rather than the one to rush. It needs a paid daily parking permit of its own, bought at the kiosk or through the AMP Park app, so budget for parking twice on a day that includes both campus and the lake. We wrote up what the glass-bottom boat trip is actually like if you want to decide before you commit the afternoon.

Evening

5:30 p.m. The LBJ thread, if you want one more thing. The university was founded in 1899, and Lyndon B. Johnson graduated from it in 1930, the only U.S. president to graduate from a Texas college. That fact turns up on every tour and in every brochure, and there is a museum downtown that takes it further: the LBJ Museum of San Marcos at 131 N. Guadalupe.

We could not verify its current hours or admission, so treat it as a bonus rather than a scheduled block, and check before you drive over. An early-evening arrival at a small museum is a gamble anywhere.

Dinner, then done. Head back toward exit 200. The dining page has the walkable and short-drive options near us, and after a day of walking, walkable tends to win.

One thing to strike from the list before it costs you an afternoon: we could not find any public tour program for UFCU Stadium, the former Bobcat Stadium. Ticketed events are how the public gets inside.

The weekend version

No guided tour. That is the constraint, and pretending otherwise is how people end up standing outside a locked Welcome Center on a Saturday morning.

What you can still do is walk the campus. A quiet Saturday shows you a different version of a university than a weekday does, and some prospective students prefer looking around without a group. The admissions site offers a walk-in self-guided tour when guided tours are full, but nothing published tells us whether that desk is staffed at the weekend. Call One Stop at 512-245-8978 before you count on picking up a map when you arrive.

The piece that makes a weekend visit worth the drive is the Wittliff, because it is open Saturday and Sunday from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and it costs nothing. Build the day around that opening time:

Morning: do something that is not campus. Campus is quiet before noon anyway. The Premium Outlets are a six-minute walk from our front door and Tanger about seven, which makes them the easiest way to spend a morning without moving the car. The river is roughly ten minutes out if the weather is behaving. Our things to do page has the rest.

12:30 p.m. The Wittliff opens. Park in a garage, go up to the 7th floor, give it an hour and a half. It closes at 4:30, same as the weekday.

Mid-afternoon: pick one, not both. The Wittliff closes at 4:30 and the last glass-bottom boat also leaves at 4:30, so a 2:00 p.m. exit from the library gets you a 3:00 or 3:30 boat at the Meadows Center with room to park and buy a permit. Try to squeeze in a 4:00 p.m. departure and you are gambling on the ticket line.

Late afternoon: downtown. The Square, and the LBJ Museum at 131 N. Guadalupe if its hours line up with yours. Confirm those first.

If you need one more thing: Wonder World Cave at 1000 Prospect Street was the first commercial show cave in Texas and has been taking visitors for well over a century. Their website would not load for us, so we have no hours or prices to quote. Call (512) 392-6711 before you drive over.

What to sort before you leave home

• Register for the tour through the admissions site, as far ahead as you can manage
• Check you registered for San Marcos, not Round Rock
• Confirm whether your tour includes the residence hall portion
• Ask about tour length and any fee at registration, since neither is published
• Bring a credit card that works, for the garage exit
• Check the Wittliff's holiday closures if you are visiting near one
• If the Meadows Center is in the plan, remember its separate parking permit and the 4:30 boat
• Numbers worth saving: TXST One Stop 512-245-8978, campus parking 512-245-2887

What it actually costs

We are not going to invent numbers, so here is the honest version.

The Wittliff is free, and it is the best-value hour of the whole day. Campus parking is never free and the rates are not published, so plan on paying at a garage and settle up by card on the way out. Whether the guided tour carries a fee is not published either, which is worth asking about at registration rather than assuming. The Meadows Center charges for tickets and requires its own daily parking permit on top.

Add a lunch, a dinner and a tank of fuel, and the real variable in a campus visit day is how many times you pay to park. Two is common. Doing all of it from a base with free parking on site takes one of those charges out of the equation entirely.

Where to base yourself

We are at I-35 exit 200 in the outlet district, which is a highway location and we would rather say so than dress it up. It has one genuine advantage for a family in town on a campus visit: San Marcos Premium Outlets is about a six-minute walk and Tanger about seven, so anyone who has had enough of touring residence halls has somewhere to go on foot while the rest of you finish the day.

Everything else needs the car, campus included. Free parking on site, a free hot breakfast before an early tour, and about fifteen minutes to the university is the trade, and for a one-night visit it is a good one.

Planning a campus visit? Check availability and rates, or see what is running on our special offers page.