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We moved to a little town called Belleville, which is nice enough for the proximity to New York, our landlord was great and the neighbors we had were even better. But a car was absolutely required, taking the bus to Newark and then the train always took forever and the direct private bus line (DeCamp) dropped me off about half a mile from the house, which was a real pain when it rained. But, like I said, if you have a car it's fine.
It's part of Essex County, which has a series of very nice small towns that have great access to New York and good schools, you'll see these names pop up a lot on these threads: Montclair, Glen Ridge, West Orange, Maplewood, but the taxes up there are typically higher than the surrounding counties for a number of reasons and we couldn't make the financials work.
But we ended up finding the town we live in (Cranford) one day when my wife was commuting on the Garden State and needed a post office. The GPS said there was one about a mile and some change off her route and she literally stumbled into this staggeringly cute walkable town with direct bus service and a train line (that requires a transfer). I literally didn't believe her at first.
But my point is that we stumbled into a town that we love by pure accident. We hadn't even been considering a move to Union County by any means and it hadn't shown up on any of the research that we had done online before then.
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