Basically anything from pilots.
My eventual goal is to be able to pack my girl, dog and a future family into a single fixed, and go from somewhere in SoCal to MMH or some hops over to SAF for a getaway. I'd love to someday be skilled and experienced enough to take it into the Pecos wilderness where we have a ton of grazing property and just land in a field and go to our cabin. This is all long term stuff though.
Ya, as I suspected. I don't think you would really like having a bush plane. To really get the most out of it, you have to keep yourself VERY proficient. One of the quickest ways to get yourself in trouble is by trying to fly into and out of unimproved runways when you fly less than 100hrs a year. That's not a knock btw, plenty of people just don't have the time to fly much more than that. Do what you like of course, but I would recommend against you getting a bush plane. I think you'll find that you like the IDEA of a bush plane, but the reality would be far different.
It would be like getting a classic Land Rover Defender as a daily driver. It looks cool, and handles those camping trips great, but it has a top speed of 55 mph, rides like a covered wagon, is loud at speed, and unreliable in general.
My recommendation would be to get a 6 place single of some flavor. General specs in this category will be:
~300 horsepower
Room for 6, (but due to weight limits really 4 + gear + fuel)
700+ Nautical Mile range
150KTs+ cruise speed @65% power
High wing or low wing won't really matter, since you're not really going to bother with unimproved strips, and even grass strips that are long enough are no problem anyway. The main thing is speed and range. For reference, in one of the planes I'm about to mention, you can easily get from LAX to SFO in less than 2 hours, and you can get from LAX to SAF in 1 leg with full fuel.
Look at some of these:
Piper Saratoga: I'm biased, but these are great airplanes. Simple, easy to maintain, and if you get a newer one can be quite nicely equipped. These will cruise at 165kts all day (retractable models) and are just overall solid aircraft.
Cessna 206: Good airplanes for hauling stuff, but quite a bit slower than the other aircraft I'll list here. Likely more expensive than Saratogas due to popularity as well.
Beechcraft A36 (and variants): This is going to be very similar performance wise to a Saratoga but it's more upscale, a bit faster, more expensive, and more expensive to maintain. To make an analogy, Pipers are Fords, Cessnas are Chevys, and Beechcrafts are Cadillacs. If you can swing the prices involved, they're very good aircraft and owners typically love them.
Cessna 210: Basically the retractable gear version of the 206. I'd recommend against them though, due to cost and complexity. The engines and landing gear systems in these can be troublesome and avoid the pressurized versions like the plague. The pressure systems are notorious for developing leaks that take $1000's to attempt to troubleshoot and solve.
Cirrus SR20/22: These are good airplanes, with modern materials and tech, good performance specs, and the excellent integrated ballistic parachute system (beware that using that system writes off the airplane). The trouble with them is they don't really have the space you're looking for I'm betting. Maybe they do, check them out for yourself. The downside to the leather interiors and cramming it full of tech is you sacrifice load carrying capacity. There are no free rides in aviation and aerodynamics, merely trade-offs.
Light twins of any type (Senecas, Barons, 310s): Avoid. Twice the complexity, requires a separate rating, twice the fuel burn, and any purported safety gains by having an extra engine are typically offset by the devilish engine-out handling characteristics. I would only recommend renting in this case, and only then for training purposes if you knew you were going to progress up to flying as a profession and needed a multi-engine rating.
Once you rule out twins, the only way to get faster and farther than the stuff I've listed here is to either go smaller, with stuff like Mooney's and Lancair's, or go bigger and turbine. Turbine singles are orders of magnitude more expensive however. If you look at things like the soon-to-be-released Epic, TBM 700/850, and Pilatus PC12's, you'll see that the speeds increase by about 100kts plus, fuel burn increases by a lot, and maintenance costs increase to levels that can bankrupt drug-dealers.
All of this is far in the future for where you're at in your flying career anyway. I would recommend renting until you get at least 250 hours under your belt. After you get your private, try to fly different stuff than a 172 just to check it out. Along the way towards that time, you might look into fractional ownership aircraft in your area (it's like entering into an partnership with others to split costs of ownership) and flying clubs. After you get your private rating, look towards getting your instrument rating. Living in the southwest like you do, an instrument rating might not be a big deal due to the sustained good weather there, but it does really open up where you can go and what you can do.