Turns Out Waco Is Exactly What I Needed and I Didn't Know It Until I Got There
I'll be honest with you. Waco was not my first choice.
It wasn't even really a choice. It was more of a default — the place that came up when someone in the group chat said we should finally do something, and someone else said they'd always wanted to see the Silos, and before anyone could suggest Nashville or Scottsdale or anywhere else that felt more like a "real" trip, we had a weekend on the calendar and a Barndominium rental confirmation in our inboxes.
I was fine with it. Genuinely fine. Not excited, exactly. Just fine.
And then we got there.
The Part Where Waco Doesn't Make a Big Entrance
Here's the thing nobody tells you about Waco: it doesn't try to impress you right away. There's no dramatic skyline moment as you pull into town. No immediate sensory overload that announces you've arrived somewhere significant.
You just... get there. You find the property. You pull into the driveway and step out of the car and stretch, and the first thing you notice is how quiet it is. Not in a boring way. In the way that makes you realize how much noise you've been carrying around without noticing.
We were staying at the Barndominium — the actual Fixer Upper horse barn on 16 private acres — and the moment the gate closed behind us and the city disappeared, something shifted. I can't explain it better than that. Something just shifted.
What the First Evening Actually Looks Like
We hadn't planned anything for Friday night. The original idea was to get in, unpack, maybe find somewhere for dinner.
What actually happened was that nobody wanted to leave.
The two-story deck off the back of the Barndominium faces west over a spring-fed lake, and we arrived right at the hour when the light was doing something genuinely unfair over the water. Someone opened something cold. Someone else pulled up a playlist. We sat down in the deck chairs and we just... stayed there.
Dinner became sandwiches from a grocery run. The conversation became the kind you only have when nobody is looking at their phone. The evening became the thing I would later describe to people when they asked about the trip — not the Silos, not the food, not any of the things I'd looked up beforehand. The deck on the first evening. That's the one.
There are places that make you feel like you need to be doing something. And then there are places that make you feel like you're already exactly where you're supposed to be. The Barndominium is the second kind, and it announces that on the very first night. 🌅
The Morning I Didn't Set an Alarm
I am a person who sets alarms. Multiple alarms. I have a morning routine that I am unreasonably committed to, and I do not, as a rule, simply wake up when I wake up and see what happens.
On Saturday morning in Waco, I woke up at 6:47am without an alarm, walked to the upstairs kitchen, made coffee with whatever was in the cabinet, took it out to the deck, and sat in the same chair I'd been in the night before.
The lake was still. The oaks were doing that early morning thing where the light comes through the leaves sideways. A bird was being loud about something somewhere to the left. I had nowhere to be for two more hours.
I sat there for ninety minutes. I thought about nothing in particular. I finished the coffee and went inside and made more coffee and came back out.
If you are someone who also sets multiple alarms and has a routine you are unreasonably committed to, I want you to understand what I'm telling you: Waco will do this to you. It will take the part of you that is always braced for the next thing and it will, without any fanfare or effort, simply set it down. ☕
The Silos, Which Are Worth It
I want to be balanced here, because I came into the Silos with slightly lowered expectations — I'd read enough "is it actually worth it?" takes to have pre-loaded a certain amount of skepticism — and I left genuinely charmed.
The grounds are beautiful. Not in a manicured, theme-park way, but in the way of a space that was designed by someone who thought carefully about how people move through a place and how it should feel when they do. The food trucks are legitimately good. The bakery at Silos Baking Co. is legitimately great — I had a cupcake at 9am and I would do it again and I have no regrets.
What I didn't expect was how much I'd enjoy just sitting on the lawn. Not shopping, not photographing, just sitting on the grass with a coffee from Magnolia Press and watching the way the morning light hit the silos and feeling, for reasons I couldn't entirely articulate, like I was somewhere that mattered.
That's Joanna Gaines' real talent, I think. Not the shiplap, not the specific design choices — the ability to create spaces that make people feel like they matter, and that the moment they're in matters. The Silos do that. The homes do that. The whole ecosystem does that, and you don't fully understand it until you're sitting in the middle of it on a Saturday morning with a cupcake. 🧁
The Mammoth Moment
Someone in the group had put the Waco Mammoth National Monument on the itinerary as a kind of joke, or at least with the energy of something they weren't sure anyone else would agree to. We went anyway, on Saturday afternoon, mostly because it was on the way back from lunch.
I don't know how to describe what happens inside that climate-controlled shelter without sounding more earnest than I usually allow myself to be in public. But you walk in, and the ranger starts talking, and you look down at the bones in the ground — the actual bones, still embedded exactly where they fell thousands of years ago — and something about the scale of it, the realness of it, the complete absence of artifice or performance, lands differently than you expected.
Nobody in our group said anything for a few minutes after we walked back outside. We just stood in the parking lot in the afternoon sun and processed it quietly.
It costs almost nothing. It takes ninety minutes. It will be one of the things you talk about when you get home. Go. 🦣
The Dinner That Went Long
Saturday night we went to Portofino's, which someone had found by scrolling through local recommendations for places that weren't Magnolia Table. Small room, warm lighting, the kind of Italian food that tastes like someone's grandmother had opinions about it.
We were there for three hours. Not because the service was slow — because nobody wanted to stop talking. That's the thing about a trip that has genuinely slowed everyone down: the conversations get better. The distractions fall away. You end up saying things to people you've known for years that somehow haven't come up before.
I think about that dinner a lot, actually. Not the food specifically — though the food was excellent — but the particular quality of the table. The way everyone seemed more present than usual. The way the evening felt unhurried in a way that evenings don't usually feel.
Waco did that. Three hours on a deck and a morning without an alarm and a mammoth that turned out to be genuinely moving, and by Saturday night everyone at the table was operating at a different frequency than they'd been on Friday afternoon.
That's not nothing. That's actually kind of everything. 🥂
The Drive Home
We left Sunday after a slow brunch — Magnolia Table, worth the wait, the biscuits are as good as advertised — and the drive home had that specific quality that good trips produce. Not quite sad. Not quite satisfied. Something in between that sits in the passenger seat and doesn't need to be talked about.
My friend who originally suggested the trip said, somewhere around the halfway point: "I think we need to come back in the fall."
Nobody argued. Someone opened the calendar app.
What I'd Tell You If You Were on the Fence
Waco is not going to announce itself to you. It's not going to grab you by the lapels in the first ten minutes and demand that you acknowledge how great it is. It's going to give you a quiet driveway and a lake and a deck and a morning without an alarm, and it's going to let you figure out the rest yourself.
That's the thing about places built with real intention — and the Fixer Upper homes, the Silos, all of it were built with real intention. They don't need to oversell themselves. They just need you to show up and give them a little time.
Show up. Give it the time. You'll know by the first evening that you should have done this sooner.
The Barndominium sleeps 16 across 5 bedrooms. The Little House sleeps 8 across 3 bedrooms. Both are just minutes from everything worth doing in Waco, and both will do to you exactly what I'm describing, if you let them.
You won't regret it. You might not even see it coming. That's kind of the point. 🏡
📩 Check availability for the Barndominium and the Little House and book the trip you didn't know you needed.