For more than twelve years, he's been picking over the world's most vaunted beaches in search of the finest—eighty of them at last count. Now, finally, Ron Hall arrives on our own shoes. He begins in Texas and ends in New England (the West Coast will follow)

My first encounter with the epic beaches of the United States took place long ago in the Deep South, and under rather bizarre circumstances. It was the summer of 1968, and Lady Bird Johnson had taken it upon herself to launch a beautification program for the state of Texas. For reasons that were never fully explained, the First Lady had decided to enlist a party of European newspaper editors to join her on a tour of Texas's beauty spots. I was one of those lucky enough to be invited.

The trip lasted most of a week. Each morning we clambered aboard an ordinary tourist bus, with Lady Bird in the front seat next to the driver. In her hand was a large microphone, from which emerged an entertaining commentary on the Texan way of life.

Every so often, the bus would stop so that trays of "wildflowers" could be off-loaded and planted in neat rows along the roadside. Clearly flowers cultivated in this way could hardly be called wild, but it would have seemed churlish, even seditious, to have pointed this out.

The highlight of the tour, however, was not the flowers but the opportunity to see the extraordinary Texas coastline. Unlike in Europe, long strings of barrier islands are a regular feature of the American seaside. They occur when shoals of sand are whipped up by the action of winds and tides and become stabilized by vegetation into dunes and beaches. Some of these barrier islands are of spectacular length and beauty.

South Padre Island, with thirty-four miles of coastline just north of the Mexican border, is a particularly fine example, and Lady Bird took her retinue of editors along to see it. Sweltering in our business suits in the ninety-degree heat, we formed ourselves into a sort of honor guard while Lady Bird cut the tape to declare the beach open as a National Seashore.

South Padre Island, Texas
Returning to South Padre Island nearly forty years later, I was apprehensive about what I might find. There are now, it is true, four substantial hotels and several clusters of condos, but nothing too out of style and scale. The magnificent white sand dunes on the northern tip of the island remain untrampled. Out in the bay, dolphins need no more prompting than a pointed camera to put in a close-up appearance. "Downtown" itself is built around three improvised beach bars. There is one tiny museum, one cinema, and one bookshop—indeed, everything you might expect in a one-horse town. It still has a pleasingly pioneering flavor. Perhaps all the work that Lady Bird put into protecting the coastline (with a little help from me) has achieved some of the desired effect.

South Padre's main claim to fame, however, is its comprehensive range of innocent beach activities: big fish, small fish, birds, butterflies, horses, jeeps—you name it and someone is out there showing you how to collect it, spot it, ride it, pursue it, hunt it, or whatever. The sheer size of the island's beach presents a challenge, but the community has sensibly solved this by running the Wave, a free shuttle bus that links the numerous public access beaches along the oceanfront.