Aussie thinking about buying real estate in USA

I have traveled a lot of the USA and have been to California, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Sth Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklohoma. On my last trip I drove from Dallas Tx up to the Mopar Nationals in Colombus OH and then across to Detroit for the Woodward Dream cruise. On that trip we drove Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee. When in California we drove highway 1 and there was some beautiful beach side towns the majority of the days though were overcast and misty. When we left the coast to head west to Paso Robles the cloudy misty weather lifted and we found it beuatuful and warm but not hot and humid. The town had a nice relaxed feel and we mentioned at the time it would be a nice place to live. It is a wine region as well so was a plus for my wife and we found a really nice brewery to have lunch. We also traveled of the coast a couple of days later to drive into Solvang and we found the weather the same on the coast cloudy and misty but a few miles west the weather lifted and was beautiful warm and sunny.

I am never going to relocate to the USA full time but it would be nice to just escape our horrible summers here in Queensland. Living near the water I suppose is not a must but I am so used to it as live north of Brisbane in a beach side suburb so it it would be nice to have the same. Our original thought was to buy a property and rent it out but enough land to build a separate granny flat that we could leave empty that we could use when we wanted to escape.

I have been looking at the real estate in Paso Robles and the existing housing is so damn expensive however I found blocks of land at very reasonable prices so am guessing the costs of building to be quite expensive. Now is probably not the time to buy as the AUD to USD is terrible but it is something that I am not dismissing in the future. Maybe I need to come in summer and spend a reasonable amount of time in the places I am interested in.