What of the samller cities? Anything with a decent population but not as big as the D/FW and Houston areas?
If you worked in Houston, it would be about an hour's drive - to GET you within an hour's drive of LAND. Houston would probably be off your list. But there are plenty of places you'd like.
Dallas is still my fave because of its cosmopolitain attitude and anything's-possible spirit. Lots of great communities in the Dallas suburbs, plus a lot of beltway areas are pretty much self-contained, business-wise, and within an easy hour of LAND.
The Texas Hill Country is quite beautiful with real hills and numerous lovely large lakes. This area of the state starts at Austin and goes north and west. In fact, if you drew a north-south line thru Austin, you'd have the perfect demarcation between the Black Plains (very flat, but lush) to the east and the Hill Country to the west/northwest/north. Lots of tech jobs in Austin if you want to draw a paycheck, OR a decent place to hang out yer own shingle. San Antonio is 90 miles to the southwest. It's a big city to be sure, but you'd have to be sure you'd feel comfortable with such a heavy Tex-Spanic influence. Just to the northeast side of San Antone on your drive in from Austin is the German-originated community of New Braunfels, pronounced by the locals as New Brawns-fulls. Still a lot of fine German folks there.
Corpus is a nice slice of heaven, but humid - hey, you won't get away from that until you get out in West Texas, where it's so dry that houses sprout evaporative coolers on their roofs instead of air-conditioners - and they actually work.
El Paso is a really cool place as border towns go, and there are some really fine amenities. And if you want land? LOTS of it available close to the city. OK, you can grow cactus on it, but it's LAND.
All in all, I'd guess that you'd have a fair shot at the kind of lifestyle you'd like in the fringes of Dallas-Ft. Worth. You can get land w/in an hour east of Dallas, west of Ft. Worth, or north or south of both these cities. And they're both very vibrant places. I'd make a couple of trips if I were you and scout out the situation.
And we haven't even touched upon the dozens of small communities scattered around the state where everyone WILL know your name and what brand of milk you buy and how much you bet on high school football games. There is a LOT of very real wealth concentrated in many parts of rural Texas where, if ya got it, you fer sure do NOT show it.
Michael
What of the samller cities? Anything with a decent population but not as big as the D/FW and Houston areas?
You might want to try some of the smaller towns around Houston, San Antonio and Austin. You might want to try Victoria, or somewhere around there.