A Summer Weekend Playbook for Selma and Schertz

Two years ago, a Saturday night on this stretch of I-35 meant Retama Park or a drive south for dinner. That equation has quietly flipped. Since February, four notable restaurants have opened or broken ground inside a half-mile of the Schertz Station shopping center, and the track's 2026 live meet is running longer and weirder than usual. For anyone already living in Selma, Cibolo, or the FM 3009 corridor, the practical result is that a full evening out no longer requires leaving the frontage road.

That's the thesis of this post. The corridor has become its own destination on the calendar you already keep, and the summer's remaining weekends are the easiest time to test the theory.

The Schertz Station corridor, restaurant by restaurant

Four openings inside one calendar year is a lot for any suburban node. Here's what's actually on the ground right now, and what's coming.

Two of these openings are worth pausing on. Portillo's ran a full year of public anticipation before its June 9 grand opening, and the Schertz store is the chain's first in the San Antonio metro. That matters less as a novelty and more as a signal that regional chains are treating the Schertz Station catchment as its own market rather than a spillover from Loop 1604. Wonder, backed by Jet.com founder Marc Lore, is a stranger animal. It runs multiple restaurant menus out of one kitchen and lets a single order mix items across brands. The Schertz build-out is a roughly $1 million tenant finish and is scheduled to begin the same week this post publishes.

Add CAVA and Smokey Mo's, and the practical read is this: dinner options on the frontage road went from mostly regional chains to a mix of Mediterranean, Central Texas barbecue, Chicago comfort food, and a tech-forward mash-up, all within walking distance of each other. That is not a common suburban story.

What Retama Park is running through August 22

The other half of the corridor's summer is the track. Retama's 2026 live racing season runs from June 25 through August 22, with post times generally at 6:15 p.m. General admission is $5, Selma residents get in free with valid ID, and parking is free year-round. On its own, that's a familiar summer routine for a lot of families in Selma and Schertz. The programming this year is where it gets interesting.

A short list of what's still on the calendar as of mid-July:

• July 17–18 — Camel, Ostrich, and Zebra racing, following a public Meet & Greet on July 16. Yes, that's the actual event name.
• July 24–25 — TQHA Futurity Weekend, showcasing Texas quarter horse competitors, running alongside the 2026 Retama Betting Championship.
• August 1 — Diamond Dig, sponsored by Americus Diamond, where participants sift for a hidden stone.
• August 8 — Family Fun Day, aimed squarely at younger kids.
• August 22 — Closing Night, capped by the Weenie Dog Races that Retama regulars will already know about.

If you have small children and have avoided the track because you thought it was strictly for pari-mutuel adults, the Camel-Ostrich-Zebra weekend and Family Fun Day are the low-friction entry points. If you like the sport, TQHA Futurity Weekend is the marquee racing card of the meet.

The library, the parks, and the free stuff

The city's summer programming keeps pace. On Saturday, July 25, Schertz Public Library at 798 Schertz Parkway closes for regular business and reopens as a nine-hole mini golf course that winds through the stacks. It runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., built out by a professional mini golf company and library volunteers, and it costs nothing. This is the kind of event that fills up with residents-in-the-know and stays invisible to anyone who isn't paying attention to the library's calendar.

Through the rest of the summer, the library also runs a drop-in Lego Lounge on Monday mornings from 10:15 a.m. to noon, which is a decent lifeline during the back half of July when the kids are done with day camp and not yet back in school.

Outside the library, Pickrell Park and Heritage Oaks Park handle the after-dark programming. The Music & Movies in the Park series has been running screenings at Heritage Oaks Park at 11700 Longleaf Parkway. Pickrell Park hosted the city's 50th Annual 4th of July Jubilee on July 3 and 4, with Josh Abbott Band headlining Friday night and the expanded fireworks show at 9:15 p.m. on Saturday. If you missed it, the follow-up events on the parks calendar include a Float & Flick screening of Zootopia 2 at Pickrell Park and Water Games with Schertz Parks & Rec at Wendy Swan Memorial Park on July 7.

For anyone who moved here in the last twelve months and hasn't yet built out a mental map of the free stuff, the short version is that the city runs meaningful programming out of three parks and one library, all north of FM 78, and almost none of it costs money.

A sample Saturday, corridor edition

To make the thesis concrete, here's how the pieces stack. This is not a hypothetical, it's what an actual Saturday, July 25 looks like if you string the corridor together.

1. Late morning — Take the kids to Library Mini Golf at 798 Schertz Parkway. It runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is free.
2. Lunch — Walk or drive to CAVA at 18406 IH 35 N. Bowls, pitas, no reservation.
3. Early afternoon — Kill an hour at Crescent Bend Nature Park or the Schertz Playscape while the kids decompress.
4. Dinner — Smokey Mo's at 18430 IH-35 N, or if the kids are lobbying hard, Portillo's chocolate cake shake at 18678 I-35 N.
5. Evening — Retama Park post time at 6:15 p.m. General admission $5, free for Selma residents with ID. It's TQHA Futurity Weekend and the Retama Betting Championship, so the racing card is strong.

The whole itinerary sits inside about a two-mile radius. That was not possible in Selma or Schertz in July of last year.

Looking past Labor Day

The one thing worth flagging for residents planning ahead: Retama's calendar keeps going after the live meet ends on August 22. The REMAX Skylight Balloon Fest lands at Retama Park on September 26, followed by the Retama Trunk or Treat on October 3, the Ford Truck Mafia Truck Show on October 24, Breeders' Cup Weekend October 30 and 31, and the Jingle Jolly Christmas Fair on November 14. If you have historically thought of the track as a summer venue and gone quiet in the fall, that mental model is out of date.

Wonder is scheduled to open at 18406 Station Rd on October 10, which means the fall version of this post will have a fifth new restaurant on the corridor and a whole new type of ordering to test.

The corridor's identity is shifting from a place people drove through to reach San Antonio to a place people from San Antonio drive to for a Saturday. That has real implications for how residents already here spend their weekends, and eventually for what the frontage road looks like at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday.

None of this changes what Selma and Schertz are at their core: two adjacent cities with strong parks, a working chamber, and a long-running relationship with a racetrack that most metros would kill to have. What has changed is the number of ways to spend a Saturday without getting on 1604 or 410.

If you're thinking about how the shifts along the corridor might affect your plans to stay put, upsize inside the neighborhood, or move a family here from another base assignment, Melisa Fitchett knows this stretch of I-35 as well as the people who eat lunch on it every day. Your Trusted Guide — Let's Connect.