Alamo Rec-Veh Park

The surrounding town is well supplied with shops, supermarkets and eateries, and you could easily pass a day wandering the stalls and sampling the street food at the enormous Mercadome flea market. The Rio Grande Valley is magnet for hikers and wildlife spotters: it’s 15 minutes' drive to the green forests of the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, and 25 minutes to both the World Birding Centre and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, richly diverse environments full of tropical birds, white-tailed deer and ocelots. If marine wildlife's more your thing, the park is an hour from the Dolphin Research and Sea Life Center Marine Touch Tanks where visitors meet the dolphins at sea, feed turtles and handle starfish. This is a big hit with kids, as are the stomach-rearranging attractions at Gravity Adventure Park and the various slides, chutes and surf waves at Schlitterbahn Beach Waterpark, both on South Padre Island an hour and 10 minutes away. Closer to your Alamo base, there’s loads to learn at the International Museum of Arts and Science at McAllen (20 minutes) and a menagerie of exotic beasts to meet at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, 50 minutes away.