Wandering Money Pig - A journey of early retirement and FIRE (financial independence retire early)

  The River Walk, San Antonio, Texas Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was watching NBA games on television.  Anytime a team would play the San Antonio Spurs ( the great Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili ), I would get to watch the beautiful city.  Two of the things that were always featured were the Alamo and the River Walk during commercial breaks. I have always wondered what it would be like to walk the famous River Walk and to visit the Alamo .  Despite visiting over 30 states in the United States, Texas, up until our ongoing cross country trip, was one of the states we had not visited. Just because of the Alamo and the River Walk , I made sure the city was included as a destination on our cross country trip going from North Carolina to California.  On the morning of December 16th, we checked out of our hotel in Galveston (Texas), then headed out to San Antonio. Just five days prior, my wife and I had met our friends in downtown Houston f

  Downtown Galveston, Texas Growing up as a Generation X, meant that I watched plenty of television.  Starting with the requisite Looney Tunes cartoons as a kid, I gradually gravitated towards watching any and all television shows on channels CBS, NBC , and ABC .  By today’s standards, just having three television channel choices seem pretty low. I can assure you that I, nor any of my friends thought that, as we didn’t know what cable channels were until the late 80’s.  Three channels would be perfectly fine for Americans, until cable took off, bringing with it so many channels.  One can argue the merits of having more choices vs just three choices, but that’s for another day… During one of those many television viewing sessions, I encountered the city of Galveston .  I learned that it was a popular destination for cruise lines, and it was also a popular local resort town with a beautiful beach.  While planning for our (my wife and myself) epic cross country trip going from North Caro

  The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas John Steinbeck:  “Texas is a state of mind.  Texas is an obsession.  Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.” Texas as a state, from someone who grew up in the Northeast, always had a mystical quality to it.  Whether it’s because of the slogans “ Everything is bigger in Texas ” or “ Texas: It’s like a whole other country ”, I’ve always wondered about the alien culture that exists in Texas, full of cowboys, football fanatics, and people with heavy southern accents. Well, like most assumptions, most of these turned out to be untrue.  Culture was definitely not alien, but rather, it was just like any other American city we’ve visited elsewhere.  We didn’t run into cowboys saying “Howdy?” or “Y’all”, and we didn’t see crazed football fans running around in team jerseys going all rabid and nuts. We felt a certain familiarity with the city of Houston, a very cosmopolitan city full of people, traffic, restaurants, and shops.  In short