You don’t need to be crazy to travel but it helps. If you’ve spent any time in an airport at any point in the last 15 years, you’ll know what I mean.
Some days I envy people who never go anywhere. They have no idea why grown-ass adults walk barefoot in public places, one hand holding their pants up and the other anxious not to have a phone in it.
As a Canadian who swallows thousands of miles to come visit a gas station outside a town in Alabama nobody in Ottawa has ever heard of, I say hell’s bells, that’s just my kind of crazy.
Honestly though? Buc-ee’s is totally worth the hassle. It’s soooo American there are buses full of tourists from distant lands over the seas that make a detour just to visit one. You have to understand that there’s only one country in the world that has gas stations like this. Anywhere else, a gas station is a normal-sized place where you get gas for your car, a pack of smokes and maybe some beef jerky.
But this place? It’s something for us foreigners to gawk at, because it’s so out of this world wacky. And I’m from Ottawa. I know beavers, OK?
This one is unique to the American South. It screams all y’all and is full of those items loud people go for.
My personal favourite is the chocolate-covered, rainbow-coloured sunflower seeds on whose package it says, proudly, “Made in the USA.”
Snort.
Who else would come up with this, let alone produce it then sell it to willing customers?
Only Buc-ee’s, the gas station with 700 pumps, is who. OK, I’m exaggerating. The one I visited only has 120. That’s one hundred and twenty individual gas pumps. And yes, on that Sunday afternoon there were people lined up at most of them. Where did all these people come from? Your guess is as good as mine. The entire region has fewer than half a million residents and is sort of half-way between Nashville and Birmingham. This ain’t where population density was invented.
When I exited I-65 there was an off-ramp straight from the highway to the parking lot that allowed me to avoid stopping or even yielding to any incoming traffic. Like the highway exit had been engineered expressly to get me to that parking lot as fast as possible. A coincidence, surely?
Somebody was trying to explain Buc-ee’s to me as if a gas station had a baby with a giant Walmart with a Cracker Barrel wedged in there somehow.
It ain’t. Buc-ee’s isn’t a cross of anything or anything else. It just is, alright?
Nowhere else do you get massive car washes outside massive stores that sell everything. I mean, everything.
Baby clothes. Dog treats. Pulled pork sandwiches. Twenty million kinds of soft drinks. Backyard BBQs, books, livestock feeders and ice – in two sizes! Don’t forget the sunglasses and those “nuggets” that are like corn pops dipped in glucose-fructose.
Buc-ee’s boasts the cleanest restrooms in America. Also in the world. I’m not sure exactly who went around the world to check on this, but — hey, I’m a journalist and I take fact-checking seriously. I had to test the beaver loo and I can categorically confirm it was a-sparkling, as were the counters, floors and walls. Someone called Buc-ee’s employees red-clad human roombas and while that’s slightly dehumanizing it’s also… not wrong. You can’t turn around without someone wiping the counter you were just looking at.
We really should turning around, I know. Give these people a break.
On the Buc-ee’s website it says the Sevierville store (in Texas, obviously), is the largest in the world at 74,707 square feet.
Well, yeah. That’s because the rest of the world is sensible enough to call a building this size a business park.
Buc-ee’s doesn’t care about the rest of the world. It just cares about being bigger and better than it. Including having the longest car wash in the world, at 225 feet. That one is not too far outside Houston (also Texas, also obviously), and – wait, what benefit does length bring? The ability to knit a sweater while a robot uses a toothbrush to clean your rims?
I know. Buc-ee’s doesn’t care about that either. Or, no doubt, the very disturbing adult-theme car-wash dream my visit inspired. Gah that was awful.
Buc-ee’s does however seem to care about its employees, judging by the salaries it pays — advertised outside the store like it’s one more thing you can buy.
It cares about selling you a rack for your firewood, some cozies for your tailgate party, cheap but surprisingly decent coffee, more snacks than you can fit in your trunk, and big — nay, enormous — smiles.
There is nothing like walking into that place at oh-shit-o’clock in the morning on your way to catch a flight back to Canada out of Nashville and being greeted with the loudest GOOD MORNING MA’AM in the universe. To this not-yet-awake Canadian, it felt almost intrusive. I didn’t think we were ready to be this intimate?
Nope, you’re right. Buc-ee’s doesn’t care about that... It will be friendly at you, whether you want to or not.
I’ve been back a few times since that first visit. And I’m slowly warming up to it. Yee-ah, eh.
