Exit, Pursued by a Chicken Wrap

A Buc-ee’s Odyssey

When I was a kid growing up in Austin, Texas, my parents would pack up me and my sister for the seventy-mile drive to San Antonio to visit our grandparents. Back then, that stretch of highway still had some breathing room. It wasn’t the wall-to-wall chain sprawl it is now—there were actual pockets of rural Texas between towns. One of those towns was San Marcos, a quiet little dot on the map back then. And tucked inside San Marcos was a stop we begged for every single time: Stuckey’s, home of the world-famous pecan log.

I liked the pecan log just fine. But it was the bins of plastic toys, the rubber tomahawks, the fake coonskin caps, and all the other kitschy treasures that kept us squirming in the back seat until my dad finally gave in. I fought many a Civil War battle in our front yard with the kid-sized musket I got from Stuckey’s, charging imaginary Yankees and dying dramatic deaths under the crepe myrtle.

Stuckey’s is still around in some form, but that San Marcos location is long gone—like so many childhood landmarks.

But if there’s a corporate descendant of Stuckey’s? It’s Buc-ee’s.

And this past weekend, Barbara, her sister, and I made the pilgrimage to the first Virginia location.

Me, Barbara’s sister, and Buc-ee the Brisket Overlord—before the sugar crash and Act I disaster

Our primary mission that day was to see The Winter’s Tale at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.But since the new Buc-ee’s was just twenty minutes down the road from the Blackfriars Playhouse, I figured we’d swing by and see what all the fuss was about. You know—grab a brisket sandwich, check out the famous wall of jerky, maybe pick up a souvenir or two.

Instead, we got a three-act drama of our own. With barbecue.

Buc-ee’s is Stuckey’s on anabolic steroids.

You could fit at least four Stuckey’s inside it—and that’s just the snack aisle.

We went on a Saturday, which, in hindsight, was probably a tactical error. I’m guessing there were 500 cars in the lot, maybe more. The place has 100 gas pumps, and we still had to jockey for position like we were in a NASCAR pit crew.

Then you walk in.

Imagine a 74,000-square-foot warehouse—bigger than a football field—with no tables, no chairs, no seating of any kind. Now cram it with hundreds of people, dozens of blinking registers, the smell of brisket in the air, coolers humming, soda machines hissing, and children spinning in sugar-fueled figure eights. It’s like the Midway at the State Fair of Texas, if the midway had been built by a logistics company with a background in brisket and chaos.

There were Buc-ee’s t-shirts, Buc-ee’s socks, Buc-ee’s bathing suits, Buc-ee’s baby bibs. There were rows of fudge, towers of jerky, fridges filled with pickles, and at least three separate stations dedicated to barbecue triage. And everywhere you turned, someone was moving in a panic, frozen in awe, or holding up the line while taking a selfie with a beaver statue.

Naturally, I went for the brisket sandwich. I’m a native Texan—I had to. Brisket is a matter of identity, not preference.

They make it right there on a butcher block in full view, slicing and chopping in a brisk rhythm (pun fully intended). I went with the sliced brisket, of course. If you’re from Texas and you order chopped, they should make you turn in your birth certificate.

Now, I’ll give Buc-ee’s some credit: it was serviceable brisket. Not life-changing. Not smoked-by-a-one-named-pitmaster-in-a-shack-outside-Lockhart good. But for a roadside attraction in the Shenandoah Valley? Not bad. Moist enough. A little bark. Mostly intact slices. They didn’t drown it in sauce, which I appreciated.

Next came the Beaver Nuggets, which people talk about like they’re the snack version of crack. I tried them. They’re like sugar-coated corn puffs—sweet, a little salty, vaguely unnatural in both taste and texture. I wouldn’t call them good, exactly. But I also couldn’t stop eating them.

And that’s when the blood sugar spike hit.

It felt like my pancreas called it quits and filed for early retirement right there between the fudge counter and the wall of trucker hats. I could feel the glucose coursing through my bloodstream like I’d mainlined syrup at a Waffle House.

Meanwhile, Barbara had taken a pass on the brisket. She went with what looked like a harmless grilled chicken wrap.

Narrator: It was not harmless.

A few hours later, we were sitting in the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, watching The Winter’s Tale. About halfway through Act I, Barbara gave me the look. The one that says: “This is not a drill.”

Moments later, she was gone—vanished from her seat like a character who took an unfortunate turn in a Greek tragedy. She reappeared about 15 minutes later, done with Buc-ee’s for the foreseeable future.

Side note: I’m fairly certain we were the only Buc-ee’s patrons that day headed to see live Shakespeare. If I had to guess, I’d say at least 80% of the crowd was MAGA-hatted or MAGA-adjacent—the kind of folks who think The Winter’s Tale is a seasonal mattress sale.

It was a performance none of us will forget.

Shakespeare wrote, Exit, pursued by a bear.

In our version, it was: Exit, pursued by a chicken wrap.

---

Later that night, after everyone’s stomach had settled and the blood sugar fog had lifted, Barbara said something that stuck with me. She told me the whole experience at Buc-ee’s gave her the creeps—not just from the crowds or the chicken wrap incident, but something deeper.

She looked around that enormous space—jammed with people, overloaded with noise, jammed exits and few places to take cover—and thought:

“This would be the perfect place for a mass shooter.”

It’s not a thought anyone wants to have, but the fact that it even crossed her mind says everything about the country we live in now. Buc-ee’s is designed to feel like a carnival: over-the-top, patriotic, aggressively cheerful. But underneath all that red-white-and-beaver branding, it’s also a soft target—a place where hundreds of people are moving in a daze, distracted by fudge and brisket, with no plan for what to do if the worst happened.

Barbara’s instinct was dead-on. That low-grade tension we now carry into crowded spaces? That’s not something we imagined. It’s something we’ve absorbed.

When you’ve experienced gun violence firsthand, you tend to make observations like that. You walk into places most people see as fun or harmless and scan for the exits. You notice how tightly people are packed. You feel the noise and the chaos not just as atmosphere, but as vulnerability.

We laughed a lot that day. We still are, days later. But somewhere between the brisket, the Beaver Nuggets, and Act II of The Winter’s Tale, we were reminded—again—that there’s no such thing as a carefree crowd anymore. Not here. Not now.

Buc-ee’s may be Stuckey’s on steroids.

But the country it lives in now? That’s changed too.

🎙️ For Paid Subscribers: