Serious? There are tons of places. East Texas has plenty of places. But, that all depends on the ‘reason’ for the leaving.
If every major city in the US was evacuated there wouldn’t be enough places for the people to go.
You would have well over 100 million people on the roads all at the same time trying to find a place to stay.
I saw it with hurricane Rita. People evacuating the Houston area going through small towns were like locust.
Every drop of gas was gone and they were still coming. Once the gas is gone there is no more coming. It was taking people up to 24 hours to go just 50-75 miles. Then there was no more gas they were stuck there.
Food stores were pretty much empty and they were still coming.
Small towns don’t have the infrastructure to take in an additional 5000 to 10,000 people and they can’t go anywhere else because they don’t have the fuel to get there.
Just how many motel room do you think small East Texas towns have. I live in SE Texas and a lot of small E Texas towns have ZERO motel rooms.