Good thread. I appreciate everyone’s insights. Lots of things to make me want to live in a Texas. Or, maybe not live in a Texas. I don’t know. Like pretty much everyone in CA, I want to get out of this place. But can’t figure out where to go.
I’ve never been to Austin, but have been to Texas a fair number of times over the years, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso. From all those visits I observed:
The people there are nice. They are friendly. Every restaurant I went to, the waitresses always called me “honey”. It’s not in any sort of bad way, it’s just a natural and friendly way to talk to someone. Seriously, they are just so nice it makes you feel good.
The food is great. In particular, anything BBQ and Mexican or Tex-Mex. We have great Mexican in CA but as far as BBQ forget it.
Houston in the middle of summer is the hottest place I have ever been. Now just a few years ago I was in Palm Springs in the summer playing golf and it hit 120F. That was hot, damn hot. But I’ll never forget how hot it was in Texas. You stepped outside, you wanted to turn right around and go back in.
I’ll never forget one night I was staying in some Holiday Inn type hotel for work, and I looked out my room window down into the parking lot where I had parked my rental car. It was some generic Ford or Chevy sedan. The entire parking lot was filled with pickup trucks except for my rental car. Literally, all pickup trucks in row after row. So, yeah, pickup truck.
It’s a big ass place. Once you get out of the big cities, you can drive for hours and hours and hardly see anything and still be the middle of Texas.
Since I will be retiring soon, I don’t need to live in or even near a big city for employment purposes. Somewhere in all of that open Texas land, there must be nice places, like small towns, where you can get a nice house on some land (a few acres) where you could also have a workshop, a garage, and a nice barn or outbuilding of some type for a game room? That’s what I would like to find.