Bustling North Texas, crowned by the twinned Dallas and Fort Worth and their endless sprawl. Geologically marked by bustling prairies and a series of reservoir lakes, with DFW International Airport, North Texas serves as the unofficial gateway to Texas for many.
Tinged with Southern charm and hidden away in vast swathes of pine forests, East Texas is where the state's long affair with oil started before heading west to the arid plains and south to the Gulf Coast. Bordered by Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, East Texas is especially in touch with life outside the state.
Texas's coast is defined by salt marshes, flat, watery plains, and an outlining string of barrier islands. Residents of the state routinely flock to its beaches, Galveston and South Padre Island first and foremost, to escape the torturous summer heat that chokes the state. They enjoy gray, grainy beaches and warm waters made murky by the Gulf's currents. Beyond its tourist draw, the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of Texas oil, its capital placed firmly in Houston among the tall coastal forests and multicultural flow of Texas's biggest city in size and population.
South Texas has been delightfully called where the "Tex" meets the "Mex," for though South Texas contains only a small fraction of the state's long border with Mexico, the portion it contains (with the exception of El Paso) is home to the state's sizable and thriving borderland communities. The main hub of South Texas is San Antonio, home to the always-remembered Alamo and the thriving, tucked away Riverwalk. In the list of Texas vacations, San Antonio sits tied at the top with the Gulf Coast, though perhaps it deserves a few more points for not being nearly as spread out.
When it comes to breaking up Texas into individual regions, there are many who argue that Central Texas is not a real place, and often it is lumped in with the Hill Country to the west or else cut up and distributed between all of its neighbors: North Texas, East Texas, the Gulf Coast, South Texas, and the Hill Country. It's easy to see why. Central Texas, like any place on a border, is a diffusion of the distinct regions that surround it, but it is in this diffusion that Central Texas gets its character. If Texas, as a state, is defined as a convergence of so many other American regions, then Central Texas is the perfect microcosm for where these regions collide most fully.
The Texas Hill Country, named for its drastic topography is home to Austin, the state's capital and a thriving hub of music, tech, politics, and general weirdness. The regions is marked by small country towns and strings of scenic state parks showing off the region's landscape.
Rising up from the Texas bulk into the Great Plains is the Panhandle. Flat grasslands stretching across the region provide the perfect home for cattle and cutting gales. Route 66 stretches across this region, threading through Amarillo before stretching north towards Chicago. Below these plains, rivers carve canyons outmatched only by their Grand cousin in northern Arizona.
West Texas is marked largely by emptiness, by small towns stretched far enough apart to drive entire state's between without anyone knowing. It is where mountains rise out of ancient seabed and the mighty Rio Grande bends to form majestic canyons. At the far western edge of the state sits El Paso, remote and divided from the rest of the state, herald and watcher over this sparse region.
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