Dallas Fort Worth with Kids: A Slow Family Travel Guide

We left Albuquerque in March, stopping a night or two here and there, before we landed in Forney, Texas, to visit family. The plan was simple: a week, maybe two, then keep moving. Coming across eastern Texas the heat was already pressing in, over a hundred degrees, and we braced for more of it. Then the land changed as we came down into the Dallas-Fort Worth area and pushed east toward Forney. It cooled. It got greener. The dry country we had been driving through for weeks gave way to grass pastures, stands of trees, and ponds sitting out across the properties. Dallas is a big city, but the outskirts caught us off guard. Homes set back on wide lots, large fields and pastures, water and trees everywhere we looked. The week or two we planned turned into two months. We were dealing with the insurance on a truck and trailer that had been damaged on the road and totaled, and Forney was where we settled in to sort it out. The time we hadn’t planned for gave us room to actually explore, and what we found reshaped the way we think about Texas.

Snapshot (At a Glance)

Location: The east side of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. We were based in Forney, with a week each in Royse City and the small town of Nevada, all sitting just east of Dallas. Lake Ray Hubbard separates this stretch from the city, and Fort Worth is another haul west past Dallas.

Best For: Families. The area runs deep on things to do with kids, with parks and ponds in nearly every small town, a large homeschool community, and the museums and attractions of a major metro within reach.

Best Time to Visit: Spring. We were here from late March into late May and had close to two months of mild, steady weather, mostly mid 70s to low 80s, with a few rainy days that stayed pleasant and only a handful that climbed into the upper 80s. Winters run fairly mild, often in the 50s and 60s. Summers get hot, though by Texas standards the locals didn’t treat it as anything unbearable.

How Long We Stayed: We ended up here two months, far longer than the week or two we planned, after the damage to our truck and trailer left us staying put to deal with the insurance. For most families, two to four weeks is the right range, enough to settle into the small towns, work in the parks and a little time at the lake, and still make a few trips into Dallas and Fort Worth.

Why We Chose This Place

We came for family. Forney is where some of ours live, and after a long stretch on the road we wanted to stop, see them, and let the kids land somewhere familiar for a little while. The plan was loose. Visit for a week or two, play at a few lakes, then keep heading toward Arkansas and points north and east.

What we didn’t plan on was needing the area for what it turned out to be good at. Dallas and the towns around it are built for resupply. Whatever you need is close, whether that’s parts, repairs, groceries, or services most small towns can’t offer. When our plans came apart and we had to regroup, being near a major metro made a hard situation easier to manage. We would have come anyway for the family. We ended up grateful for everything else the area quietly made possible.

Outdoor Adventures & Things to Do

The thing we did most was the simplest. We found parks. Almost every small town around us had one, most of them had a pond, and the ponds had turtles. The kids never got tired of it.

Ben Gill Park in Terrell became a regular stop, a big park with a large pond, baseball fields, and enough turtles to keep everyone busy. We went back again and again. Over in Sunnyvale, Brittney took the kids to Town Center Park, another pond with trails and room to roam.

For Hyrum, the snakes were the real draw. He found plenty of them, and for him that was its own kind of paradise.

We made it into the cities too. The Fort Worth Stockyards were worth the drive, and watching the cattle drive come through is the kind of thing you don’t see anywhere else. In Dallas we spent time at the Dallas Zoo, which is large and well kept and easily fills a day with kids.

We also visited the Institute for Creation Research and its Discovery Center for Science and Earth History, a creation science museum in Dallas. We found it fascinating, deep in research and carefully put together, enough that we went back a second time on our own just to take it all in. You don’t have to share its perspective to find it worth a visit. We heard from people who don’t, and who still came away impressed by the depth of what’s there.

Lake Ray Hubbard sits between Dallas and where we were staying, and we drove out to a few spots along its edge to spend a little time near the water, though we never camped there. The better lake day was in Rockwall, at the Harbor. It’s a waterfront district built out along the lake with a boardwalk and dock that feel more like the coast than inland Texas, restaurants lining the water, the whole place set behind the lakefront Hilton. It made for a really fun afternoon out.

Community & Culture

What stayed with us most about this area wasn’t a place. It was the people. Everywhere we went, folks were warm in a way we weren’t used to. Kind, open, quick to talk, friendly without any of it feeling like a performance. We had come from years out West, much of it in the Pacific Northwest, where people tend to keep more to themselves and hospitality runs quieter and more private. Texas felt like the opposite.

It’s easy to underestimate how much that matters when you’re passing through somewhere during a hard stretch. We weren’t locals, we weren’t staying forever, and we were working through a situation that had upended our plans. None of that seemed to change how people treated us. That kind of ordinary, everyday warmth made a difficult season easier to sit in.

The Homeschool Scene

This part of Texas has a large homeschool community, and you can feel it even without trying. The libraries are plentiful, the museums are real and well funded, and there are programs running all over the area for families who school at home. From everything we saw, a family that wanted to plug in could find more than enough to fill a calendar.

We didn’t, at least not this time. The stretch we were in was chaotic, sorting out the wreck of our plans and figuring out what came next, and we let our usual rhythms slide. That was about our season, not the area. The resources are here in abundance, and a family arriving in a steadier frame of mind than we were would have no trouble finding their people.

Foodie Finds

We didn’t do this area justice on food, and we’ll own that. We were in Texas and never tracked down a proper barbecue joint or a real Tex-Mex spot, which we still regret a little. The season had us eating simple and close to home more than exploring. A few places stood out enough to pass along, though.

The one we kept coming back to was Film Alley in Terrell. It’s a dine-in theater where they bring your food right to your seat while the movie plays, and the food is actually good, not the usual overpriced popcorn and candy. The price surprised us. We spent about the same on a real meal as we would have on snacks at a normal theater, and the whole experience was better for it. Brittney loves a good theater, and this became a regular treat, sometimes a date night, sometimes the whole family.

For a date night, we tried a Mediterranean buffet called Dimassi’s, about twenty minutes from Forney over in Mesquite. We’re usually wary of buffets. This one was the exception. The food was fresh and good, the kind of meal you feel fine about afterward.

We also ended up at a couple of Asian buffets, which aren’t usually our pick, but buffets work better for one of our kids, who does much better when he doesn’t have to wait for his food. Taking the wait out of the equation makes eating out possible on days it otherwise wouldn’t be.

Where We Stayed

Our setup here was a patchwork. We spent a week in an Airbnb in Royse City and another in the town of Nevada, and the rest of the time we parked on family’s property near Forney. That last part wasn’t the original plan. We’d booked an RV park in Terrell, close to family, and meant to stay there.

The trailer changed our minds. After the damage we’d taken on the road, the frame was twisted badly enough that the slides barely worked, and nothing about setting up and breaking back down felt safe or certain. Parking on family land took that risk off the table. If the trailer gave us trouble there, we had the room and the time to deal with it without it turning into a crisis. We canceled the RV park reservation and stayed put.

If your rig is in good shape, the area has plenty of RV parks, and the one in Terrell was conveniently close to the kind of small-town parks and ponds we kept visiting. Airbnbs are easy to find across these towns too. Our choice came down to the condition of our trailer more than anything about the parks themselves.

Closing Thoughts

Two things stick with us from this stretch, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is the traffic. We had spent so long in rural and remote places that we’d nearly forgotten what real congestion feels like, and we assumed that living out in the smaller towns east of Dallas would keep us clear of it. It did not. Even out among the big properties and open pastures, the roads were busy, full of people and cars in a way that caught us off guard.

The other thing is the weather, and it’s the part we’ll remember longest. Close to two months of steady, comfortable spring, mostly mid 70s to low 80s, with only a few rainy or cooler days and a couple that nudged into the upper 80s. We can’t remember a spring that stayed that even for that long.

We’ll also remember the small, almost funny conveniences. Coming from places where the nearest anything was a long drive, it amazed us that groceries showed up at the door within half an hour, that Amazon arrived the same day or the next, that Walmart was delivering by drone in a town like Forney. None of it is why you’d come here, but after where we’d been, it was a strange and welcome thing to get used to.

We came to see family and meant to stay a week. We left two months later with a different picture of Texas than the one we’d carried in, greener and kinder and more comfortable than we expected, and grateful for the unplanned time it gave us.