https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_...
A lot of us still refer to Texas; Iowa; Nebraska; Missouri; etc... as just 'mid-west'. California, Oregon as 'West Coast'; Washington as 'Upper/Northwest Coast'; Arizona/New Mexico as Southwest; and Wyoming/Nevada as West.
Goes back to the days of expansionism in the early to mid-1800's, Texas and the Mississippi River were the "East/West" dividing line. Texas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma also have the standard 'west' cartoon and movie stereotype (cowboys; saloons; tumbleweed; desert; etc...). In the mid-west it's more field or forest. And freezing cold wind. Lots of freezing cold wind.
Texas as an idea is considered part of the American west, but as with most things it's more complicated than that.
Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso, at the western edge.
Eastern Texas starts out looking like the rest of the southeast -- lush, green, piney. The coastal part, or at least the part closer to Louisiana, is very like Louisiana with plenty of wetlands and live oaks and whatnot.
But that thins out quickly, and within a couple hundred miles Texas starts to look more like "movie Texas" and becomes more stereotypically West.
(A fun flip side to all this is that a simple majority of Texans -- which is to say, just slightly more than 50% -- live in the metro area of Houston or the combined metro area of Dallas-Ft Worth. The bulk of the rest live in and around Austin or San Antonio. Almost NO ONE lives in Texas between San Antonio and the western side of the state, comparatively speaking.)
You weren't kidding. I just checked a map and Texas is as wide as France and Germany combined. No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space.
I live in one of the many states both smaller and less densely populated than Texas. As someone who immigrated to the US from a tightly-packed Asian country, the argument against immigration on the basis of "there's no room" never made any sense...
Texas ranks 2nd in terms of population (29M; only CA has more) and also area (261,000 square miles; Alaska is more than 2x as large), so our overall density is nothing of note. Texans are VERY unevenly distributed -- a simple majority of us live in the metro areas of either Dallas-Ft Worth or Houston. It's like 70% if you include San Antonio and Austin.
And there's a LOT of big empty space west of all those cities.
The southernmost east-west Interstate is called 10 ("I-10"), and runs from Jacksonville, FL (which is on the Atlantic Ocean) to Los Angeles, CA (which is, obviously, on the Pacific).
These highways have frequent, standardized signs on them from time to time to tell you how far away upcoming cities, towns, or even roads are in miles. Just inside the eastern border of Texas, on the westbound side, there's a highway sign that I'm pretty sure just exists as a flex or brag.
It says something like -- and my numbers may be slightly off, but they're roughly correct at least:
Beaumont 18
El Paso 857
The gist is "one place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is 20 minutes away; another place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is MOST OF A THOUSAND MILES AWAY."
I believe it's true that crossing Texas on I-10 constitutes about 1/3 of the distance across the US -- like, it's about 1/3 from Jacksonville to the border, about 1/3 across Texas, and about 1/3 from El Paso in the west to LA. There's a highway sign on Interstate 10 just inside the TX/LA border, and I'm pretty sure it just exists as a flex.
In fact, Austin, the state capital, is farther away from El Paso than it is to any of the states (or country) that Texas borders. Or put another way: El Paso, which is in the middle of a desert, is closer to the Pacific Ocean (via the Gulf of California) than its own state capital.
While we're on the subject of the vastness of Texas, Big Bend National Park is a true wonder and definitely worth a visit.
I love your state and hope to be there for the 2024 Total Eclipse in April. (RV parking for a night, anyone, lol?)
But yeah, driving the great state of Texas takes some time, doesn't it? o_O
I was surprised when I started to scroll maps and trip plan .. and I'm saying this as a Canadian -- most of our 10 provinces and all of our 3 territories are bigger in area than Texas but a whole lot less populated. Looking forward to Texas splendour...
I have done a day trip to Austin before, for a business meeting booked on short notice, but that's 170ish miles one way. It sucked. And no, rail isn't really a usable thing.
In 30 years in Texas, I have FLOWN from Houston to Dallas more often than I've driven there.
The second largest state in the union.
California is 1000+ miles north-south, albeit only 560 miles east-west.
And Alaska is several Texas' in size.
To the chagrin of Texans, were Alaska to be split in half, Texas would be the third-largest state ;-)
The Israeli sighs and replies, "Yeah, I know. I once had a car like that."
(For comparison, Israel is a whole country, and in some places is less than 6 miles wide total!)