Getting Around Texas

How big is Texas?

Diann Bayes wanted to know. Sure, she could’ve Googled it and gotten an answer, but she had a better idea.

She drove the entire perimeter of the state, along with Debra Bustos and Morgan Taylor, two colleagues in the travel industry.

“I called them. I’d known them not long at all. And I said, ‘Would you like to go with me?’ ” Bayes says. “Immediately, ‘Yes, we want to go.’ ”

In June 2020, once pandemic travel restrictions were lifted, the three women packed into a rental car loaded with luggage. Their route, which started in the North Texas town of Gainesville, would take them 3,331 miles around the state. (For reference, the drive from New York City to Los Angeles is about 2,800 miles.) They kept to major roads while sticking as close as possible to the state’s borders, which was particularly difficult in wide-open West Texas.

It wasn’t a race. Bayes, a road trip enthusiast who insisted she do all the driving, made it a point to stop in as many towns and roadside attractions as possible over their nine-day expedition.

They visited Paris’ cowboy hat-topped Eiffel Tower and the Kolache Shop in Brazoria, watched a sunrise from South Padre Island, grabbed a steak dinner at Terlingua’s Starlight Theatre, saw the University of Texas Permian Basin’s Stonehenge replica in Odessa, and checked out the world’s littlest skyscraper in Wichita Falls.

“Those little gems are everywhere in this state,” Bayes says.

As they journeyed, Bayes documented the trip on her newly created blog, How Big Is Texas, listing every stop along the way and all the parks and museums she would’ve stopped at if only there’d been more time. It was the start of a new calling—as a travel blogger. Her whole goal, she says, is to help others experience the kind of joy she gets from collecting treasures, memories and stories and head out on their own quests.

“There’s cool stories just everywhere,” Bayes says. “That is the appeal to me. I love being able to find those stories.”

After her trip, Bayes heard from a man who was going to follow her route, though he planned to take a full 30 days to complete the loop. As he traveled, he called periodically to update her on his progress.

“He told me that he had lost his wife years earlier and he just kind of stopped traveling, stopped doing things,” Bayes says. “He said because he saw what we did, it encouraged him to get out.”

That was exactly what Bayes hoped her blog would accomplish—that it would inspire others to get out and see more of the world.

“People who don’t go make me sad,” she says. “I mean, there are a lot of people who never leave past their county or leave past, you know, two or three counties away.”

Bayes, who spent more than 30 years working in the tourism industry at restaurants, hotels and visitors bureaus, just wants people to get out and explore. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Most of her blog is about road trips she takes alone or with friends, often just over a weekend.

In 2021, she teamed up with Darla Dear, her high school best friend and college roommate, for a tour of Texas’ “most mispronounced towns and cities.” The pair traveled to Colmesneil (COLE-muh-neel), Humble (the “H” is silent), Buda (BYOO-duh), Gruene (GREEN) and Boerne (BER-nee). At each stop, they made friends with locals who affirmed the proper pronunciation.

In 2022, Bayes and Dear spent a long weekend visiting every Buc-ee’s in Texas—34 at the time. The friends ate only food purchased from the mega-gas station for the duration of the trip.

“Probably my favorite had to be when we did our Beaver Nugget and wine pairing,” Bayes says. “We just were laughing in our hotel room. I mean it was just so funny to us.”

Dear was happy to reunite with Bayes for the trips—and to have the ultimate Texas tour guide. “Just being in the car and getting to spending time with her, she is such a positive person,” Dear says. “I think I know everything there is to know about Texas, but then whenever I get with Diann, she shames me.”

The key to Bayes’ ambitious tours of the state, Dear says, is meticulous planning. “She has a schedule, and she sticks to it. She has everything mapped out.”

In 2023, Bayes did a “global tour” of Texas, visiting the towns of Athens, Bogata, Carthage, Geneva, Klondike, Naples, New London, Palestine and Trinidad.

And last year, she completed a long-term goal of visiting all of Texas’ 254 counties, though not in a single trip. She’s currently working on visiting every state park and all eight of the state’s minor league baseball stadiums.

All of it gets documented on the blog, and Bayes keeps her followers updated on social media and started a podcast too. In late 2025, she transitioned to working full time on the blog. Aware that she’s an anomaly, starting a social media career in her 60s, she calls herself a “grandfluencer.”

“I’ll own that,” she says. “The whole history of my life has led to this.”

Bayes, a fifth-generation Texan, has lived in 22 Texas towns in her life, knows the state well and is eager to show it off, especially the parts off the beaten path.

“Some people say Texans are arrogant,” she says. “I’m one of those proud Texans, and I don’t think of it as arrogance. I think of it just as pride, and I hope that other people have that same pride.”

Bayes and her husband, Dan, recently moved to Bullard, near Tyler, where they are members of Cherokee County Electric Cooperative. In their new backyard, Dan constructed a she-shed to serve as a headquarters for her work.

Like Bayes, the office—she calls it the Official International World Headquarters of How Big Is Texas—is full of stories. The building is modeled after a store her great-grandfather owned in Troup. She displays a quilt from her grandmother and a set of dominoes from her great-grandparents that are almost too worn to use anymore.

From floor to ceiling, the walls are covered in Texas memorabilia acquired from friends and on her travels. She leaves the playlist she made for the original perimeter trip on repeat as she works.

“I just have fun memories of things and places I’ve been, stories that I remember,” she says. “I’ve got art from people I know and from people I don’t.”

There are still plenty more trips she wants to take. “I will look at a map and just go ‘OK where have I not been?’ ” she says. (The list is quickly shrinking but includes 10 state parks, Fiesta San Antonio and Washington’s Birthday Celebration in Laredo.)

“I like to go to state parks. I like to go to historic sites. I like to see what the story was. I love town squares, especially in small towns, and I love a diner. I love something that’s not fancy. I want to go in because you’re going to hear people talking in there.”

A few years back, she visited the London Museum, a small museum in East Texas that tells the story of a 1937 natural gas explosion at a school in New London that killed nearly 300.

At the café across the street from the museum, she met a man who had been a first responder that day. At 101 years old, he was one of the last living rescue workers. He told Bayes about the impact of the explosion on his life and how in the aftermath of that tragedy, legislation passed to add odor to natural gas. It’s the stories like his of towns like New London that Bayes says she wants to bring attention to.

“We need to figure out how to tell a story to get people to go see them and maybe go into the grocery store, buy a few groceries or go buy some stamps or something,” she says. “Because otherwise you lose those stories and you lose that town.

“I want people to go see them, so I’m going to tell that story all day long.”