Why Buc-ee's Is The South's Best Travel Stop

The thing about Buc-ee’s is that, before you’ve been to one, it doesn’t make any kind of sense. And after you’ve experienced it firsthand, you don’t need for it to. It’s a 24-hour mega gas station with a bustling barbecue joint inside—a retail experience that’s part home-decor store and part outdoor outfitter. In this gawker’s paradise, the people-watching is surpassed only by the dizzying selection of snacks. I had never stepped foot in a Buc-ee's (or knew much about it) until now. I was on a mission to find out why it was named The South's Best Travel spot.

Folks come for the abundant and obsessively maintained restrooms and stay to browse the corn hole sets, footed pajamas, deer feeders, and scented candles (including some perfumed with the sugary aroma of their signature puffed-corn treat, the Beaver Nugget). You’ll find anything from a 14-ounce tub of bacon grease to a Dutch oven or a cast-iron smoker.

You could even complete your Christmas shopping here. Depending on your predilection for branded products (the namesake bright-eyed beaver in a jaunty red cap is omnipresent), your loved ones might be none the wiser. Speaking of which, the only line you’re likely to wait in is the one for a photo op with Buc-ee himself.

The impressive size of the store is really secondary to the comforting chaos that comes from wedging so many disparate yet familiar objects into an unexpected location—one that is open around the clock. It’s a spectacle that’s sprung from the sum of individual parts that, on their own, are not especially spectacular. Barbecue station employees who sing a call-andresponse routine every time a fresh piece of meat comes onto the slab for carving? In a restaurant, it would be a little charming but kind of hokey (and a bit grating at some point). But in a gas station at midnight, it’s practically hallucinatory. One must wonder—do these singing brisket slingers ever sleep? 

Buc-ee’s outlets weren’t always so all-encompassing (and to be fair, not all of the older, more scaled-down locations are that way even now). Arch “Beaver” Aplin III opened the original in 1982 in a small South Texas town on a foundation of bagged ice and nice bathrooms and saw enough success to add a second location nearby just a few years later. Over the decades that followed, Aplin continued to build his brand in Texas, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum. The stores didn’t start to get supersized until the early 2000s and didn’t breach the state’s borders until 2019, when the Loxley, Alabama, spot was established. Today, there are Buc-ee’s in eight states across the South, with expansion beyond the region on the road map for this year.

Still, the store’s DNA remains steadfastly Texan: Every Buc-ee’s will have brisket and kolaches along with a small town’s worth of specialty-food counters (think fresh fudge and hot candied pecans). But each of the markets likes to add its own flavor, whether that’s in the form of actual local fare or via merchandise touting hometown sports teams and nearby national parks. 

Last November, I had my first Buc-ee’s experience in Sevierville, Tennessee. I had just emerged from a two-day driving tour traversing twisty, mist-cloaked roads through the Great Smoky Mountains, part of an Asheville-to-Nashville leaf-peeping adventure I planned with my mom on a whim. It was, for the moment, both the newest Buc-ee’s and (as proclaimed by the several news outlets that documented its opening) the largest convenience store in the entire world. An array of snack foods and souvenirs unfurled across its impressive 74,707 square feet—a size that rivals some domestic airport terminals. The sheer enormousness of it was hitting all the patrons differently. One school-age child wandered the aisles urging other visitors to simply (but genuinely) “Enjoy… enjoy!” Meanwhile, in a relatively calm corner near the slushy dispenser, a weary-looking man was resting his basket atop a wall of bottled-water pallets and muttering to someone (maybe just himself), “I think this is the safest place to be in the whole store.”

In preparation for my trip, I’d done my homework—that is, I’d watched TikTok videos of other individuals documenting their own first visits to Buc-ee’s—and wondered if I would feel the same frenzied energy they did when I walked through the sliding glass doors. I’d also read reports on the must-try items and polled friends about their go-tos. Doing any kind of research before going to a gas station was a new one for me, as was much of the in-store experience.

I ambled, sampled, and successfully maneuvered the pit stop in an ill-advised outfit (involving overalls and multiple layers of outerwear) without breaking a sweat or landing in a single suspicious puddle. I fielded two separate phone calls from my mother, who was exploring her own zone on the other side of the building, and longed for a walkie-talkie. (Will searching for your parents in a Buc-ee’s one day replace the childhood rite of passage of getting lost in a mall?) I dutifully filled my cart with two types of Beaver Nuggets and three flavors of jerky along with a T-shirt and a particularly eye-catching cooler bag in the same simple graphic black-and-yellow style of the chain’s iconic roadside billboards. 

Eventually, I reunited with my mother by the meat counter, and together we took in one final performance of the brisket song before making our way out to the car to eat. (Seemingly the only thing that the Sevierville outpost doesn’t have on its premises is a seated dining area.) As we polished off our brisket sandwiches in the parking lot, swapping her chopped version for my sliced one partway through, we reflected on all we’d encountered and what we’d tell our friends. And then I did something else I’d never done at a gas station before: I totally forgot to fuel up. Fortunately, there was another Buc-ee’s just a quarter tank or so down the road.