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That's also like HOURS from major population centers of Texas. It's a huge state. This is the equivalent of a guy in Burlington, VT bragging about the beaches of Cape Cod in Massachusetts as his own terrain.
I think most people's idea of Texas is pretty accurate for the vast majority of people living in Texas.
This is East Texas.
I literally drive through areas like this from Houston to Longview every time I go back to visit Family that still lives in East Texas.
Upper East Texas to Deep East Texas is literally small cities and towns that span from Jasper to Texarkana. Might not be any major metropolitan areas in this part of Texas but we do have small metropolitan areas such as Tyler MSA, Longview-Marshall MSA and Texarkana MSA. East Texas is heavily wood but it's not isolated or desolated. You can literally see on the map how many small towns and cities are connected to one another. Plus there's plenty of Texans in major cities like Houston and DFW that frequent East Texas to fish and hunt.
This part of Texas could literally be another state all to itself. So no most people's perception of Texas is not accurate at all. Especially when a lot of people have a perception that the majority of the state is some kind of desert.
Also heavy forested areas like this are literally less than an hour away from a city like Houston and about an hour and 30 mins from Dallas. Most visitors from out of state will always bypass East Texas because it's not as tourist friendly as small towns in Hill Country( plus it helps when those small Hill Country towns are in close proximity to Austin and San Antonio) and we're overshadowed by the major cities in Texas. East Texas doesn't have a major city in the region like those hill country towns where they can attach themselves for tourist looking for day trips from the big city.
To each their own, but I think at least a plurality of people will prefer the the lusher environment (Ohio).
I'm a Texan and judging from that picture I would definitely chose Ohio over that park in Bastrop. But Bastrop terrain is a lot different than other areas in Central Texas. It's called the Lost Pine area for a reason.
I’ve gone through Texas twice now. The I-10 the whole way across from El Paso to Beaumont, and now the I-40. I’d like to note that what I’m going to write is basically on what can be seen from these two corridors, as I’ve never been to places outside of this like Austin or Dallas etc.
El Paso, to me, is a beautiful area. You are on a steep hillside along the river, with some immediate mountains, and a clear shot view of the colorful buildings in Mexico. Immediately after the desert the grass is brown and dry, but you still have some mesas and elevation changes just like eastern NM that keeps things interesting. It isn’t until approximately where the I-10 / I-20 loop that this starts to change. Find New Mexico’s eastern border, and draw it straight down. It is about this area looking eastward (of course with a little give or take like around Big Bend and of course the I-40 portion in eastern NM looks like this a bit already) that it starts getting ugly. I’m talking dry, arid brown grass, no plant life, no hills, etc. deserts usually have enough geologic features going on or weird plant life to keep it interesting, but not highly arid transitional plain like this. And along the I-10 it doesn’t start getting pretty again until a small town of Junction, TX approximately. It’s about here you start seeing some hills, a couple trees, etc. which I can respect as a nice area.
If you look up about where Junction, TX is and the eastern NM border, you’ll find that this essentially lines up with the boundaries of the Texas panhandle if you simply kept those lines going north / south. This imagery is how I imagined most of the Great Plains. Completely flat, null and void of hills and any trees, brown grass. It’s how I imagined most of Texas. To be fair, this is a good amount of Texas, and a large chunk of this country as a whole, but it’s not the majority of it, nor where most people live. This landscape is incredibly ugly to me. Amarillo, TX is officially the ugliest city to me. If the most interesting thing you have to look at is a wind turbine… where you are is ugly. To be fair I haven’t seen Midland-Odessa area, which I suspect looks like this but is even uglier because instead of wind turbines you have oil rigs.
When you hit Junction and start going through a surprise hilly area, it’s not before long you are then once again surprised by San Antonio. The traffic begins. You are trying to get across Texas and survive so after taking a San Antonio bypass freeway you end up back on the I-10 towards Houston. This area, the southern portion of the TX triangle, is very flat, but green, with some patches of trees. I suspect this would be more treed if it wasn’t for what I assume agriculture. It’s been a minute since I’ve driven the I-10 but I believe it was around the town of Columbus, TX that it started to get noticeably forested. Again hard to tell with the amount of farmland and the eventual Houston sprawl. Of course east of Houston looked just like southern Louisiana, almost obscene amounts of plant life and swampy, no surprise there, where what you can see other than the swamp is the tree wall on both sides of the interstate. I think swamps can be pretty, but the ones off the I-10 weren’t, you get prettier swamp scenery from the I-10 in Louisiana.
The hilly area between Junction and San Antonio is the second prettiest part of Texas to me, outside of the immediate El Paso area. Again I haven’t seen all of Texas and I probably never will, but western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma were almost jaw dropping pretty to the point it surprised me that this existed in this part of the country. So I suspect that this carries into NE Texas, but I haven’t been there. Not sure if it will be as mountainous and have as many pine trees. And I suspect Dallas is too far west for any of that since I didn’t start seeing it in Oklahoma until quite a ways past OKC, can’t remember exactly when I started seeing the change.
My conversations with people think Texas looks straight up like Arizona, with plateaus and mesas and even saguaro cacti. Now I’d say the Rio Grande Valley (including El Paso) could blend in with southern Arizona pretty nicely, but not even New Mexico gets saguaros come on now. I still see Texas being marketed on tourist Knick-knacks with saguaro on them (like a TX shaped keychain). Then there are people like me who thought a lot of Texas was gonna look like Amarillo, which ended a lot more quickly than I thought headed eastward, is not true. I predict that Dallas is like OKC which is small rolling hills and green grass, not a ton of trees but still trees. It’s not bad but it’s nothing to write home about, but you are right in that this is how I imagined Illinois to look and not Oklahoma and Texas. I think in my mind Texas was too south and too hot to have grass that green without being a rainy swampland like we know exists in parts of Texas, but definitely not all of it.
What it boils down to is a lack of knowledge. People assign Texas to the Wild West, which the media typically used Arizona to make films out of for location shooting, so they think it’s that. People even think the Alamo is in the desert (yes I’ve heard this). San Antonio is not a desert. Maybe this perception will begin to correct itself now that more and more people have visited or moved to Austin but to most people the geography of Dallas southwest to San Antonio and then west from there was essentially vague (I think everyone knows that Houston was forested and swampy) and ill-defined. Having driven through all the transitions twice now, you really can only see it by car or train. And since it takes 3-4 days to make that drive depending, most people are going to rightfully so fly over that instead. Texas is the only state that goes through all the transitions, from the deserts of El Paso to the swamps of Beaumont. But with one place name, people don’t see a gradient or anything deeper than a surface level image. Will they think of a John Wayne movie like the most famous Searchers which in the plot was set in Texas but mostly filmed in Arizona and Utah at Monument Valley? Or will they think of a crawfish captain? Or is it something else, like a cowboy rancher on a brown grassy plain?
When I hear Texas I think of a lot of things, but Buc-ees is what comes to mind first now. I stopped thinking about the cowboy rancher on grassy plains, I now think of Buc-ees.
I'm a Texan and judging from that picture I would definitely chose Ohio over that park in Bastrop. But Bastrop terrain is a lot different than other areas in Central Texas. It's called the Lost Pine area for a reason.
Interesting. I went an hour or so north to this random lake in Central Texas. Looks different, but still not very lush. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Un...!4d-97.5996579
Am I just finding anomalies? Serious question. I actually spent a summer in Austin, TX, and while there were some lush-ish areas, the overall terrain I was exposed to was nothing like Ohio in regards to greenery. But, I didn't go all over Central Texas while I was there, mainly the Austin metro area and the Texas Hill Country.
Interesting. I went an hour or so north to this random lake in Central Texas. Looks different, but still not very lush. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Un...!4d-97.5996579
Am I just finding anomalies? Serious question. I actually spent a summer in Austin, TX, and while there were some lush-ish areas, the overall terrain I was exposed to was nothing like Ohio in regards to greenery. But, I didn't go all over Central Texas while I was there, mainly the Austin metro area and the Texas Hill Country.
Try visiting in April or May. A dry summer will be brown because of the 100 degree heat literally bakes moisture out of the plant life. Central TX and Ohio are comparable in terms of annual rainfall, nearly 4x what would classify as a desert.
So no most people's perception of Texas is not accurate at all. Especially when a lot of people have a perception that the majority of the state is some kind of desert.
I guess I was meaning people who have travelled to Dallas, Austin or Houston for work etc, even if briefly, can get a pretty good idea of the terrain of those areas that corresponds pretty well to where TENS of millions of Texans live. Very few of my colleagues in Boston, Chicago think Texas is a desert, because they have all travelled to those cities, even if for a single day business trip, connection flight or layover. What I mean is there's not some secret stash of lushness in DFW that people are misinterpreting when they think about DFW terrain and environment.
Try visiting in April or May. A dry summer will be brown because of the 100 degree heat literally bakes moisture out of the plant life. Central TX and Ohio are comparable in terms of annual rainfall, nearly 4x what would classify as a desert.
Well there you have it. I have heard the bluebonnet blooms, etc. are spectacular. I don't doubt springtime in Texas is lovely. But this does not take away from the fact that Central Texas has just a completely different landscape and climate than Ohio. Not being a desert =/= being as lush as Ohio. Step into a forest in either and you're sure to feel that.
It really shocked me a few years ago driving the backroads from Austin to Dallas at how much that part of Texas looked like large swaths of the Midwest.
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