Lol. Glad I posted on here then and asked.

I'm from all over the northeast but I've lived on Long Island for awhile and outside Philly for awhile. I don't want the city "vibe," it's just that I like the fast pace and when people are quick and efficient (like at stores, restaurants, businesses, and just people in general). I also like when people and businesses generally have a better idea of what is good quality (food, customer service, etc.). At least in our own personal experience those things drop off dramatically after >1 hr outside of big cities. Obviously not saying there aren't plenty of people like that who don't live near big cities, just that there's much less of them in our experience. If I could find a suburban area with these characteristics that were 2-3 hour from a big city I'd be fine with that too, it's just a lot more difficult. It's just being closer to the city also offers more benefits like closer big airport, bigger concert venues, etc.

Yikes. That's gonna be a no for us, dawg.

Yeah someone mentioned the Newbury area and that looks beautiful. We'll check out south of Boston too but just didn't seem as much our style...but again that's just on Google Map and not in person.

We are fortunate in that it's relatively easy to get jobs in our specialties and we aren't picky. It's a long story but the short story is my wife will switch to part-time when we get to MA and I am going to go part-time and/or do some traveling work after a few years of full-time. So we care a lot more about home life than work life.

I'll add this to the list, it looks beautiful. We like Portland a lot and we're not picky about where we work so we'd be fine in NH or ME.

Sweet, thank you. I'm fine with the white collar or blue collar neighborhoods so I'll just check out both cities.

Good to know, thanks. I just saw it recommended as a popular place on some prior posts here.

Looks like lots of parks and hikes around it. I like

Fair point. I lived on Long Island for many years so I am very familiar with the latter and would prefer to avoid bumper to bumper for an hour

Oof. Lexington looks sweet (someone also mentioned it below) but yeah, not excited about 1 hour for 15 miles

Maybe I should have clarified - we are not planning on working at hospitals in Boston city proper, so we won’t be city commuters

Yeah right now the outside-Burlington area has looked super promising so we’ll check out this town too. Looks super nice on a cursory glance. Any thoughts on Wilmington versus Lexington? Someone mentioned Lexington below

Is this only during the commuting hours or all the time? We’re trying to avoid hospitals in Boston city proper so ideally we’d only Be driving into Boston 1-2x per month for leisure. We just like the proximity of a big city from a culture standpoint

That’s a really good idea. We’re going to try to live in 2 different cities for a few days each and simulate driving to work, going grocery shopping at peak hours, checking out schools, etc. So we’ll definitely add this to the list, that’s an awesome ifea

We’re not city people per se (I.e. don’t want to spend a lot of time IN the city) and we’re trying for jobs NOT in Boston proper so hopefully no major issues. We don’t mind driving a bit though. We’d probably only go into Boston once a month. It’s more so that in our experience if there isn’t a big city close to where you live the pace of life and people are just not as sharp or quick as we’re used to (we’ve both grown up around NYC, DC, Philly and Providence). Hopefully that makes sense

I spent 10 years on Long Island as well so I don’t mind some traffic but I don’t want that level of traffic every day. But again my hope is that if I’m not driving actually into Boston it won’t be terrible

Haven’t signed with one yet, we’re not too picky on hospitals and are used to a 2 hour commute right now (we live in Bumblefuck) so a 30-60 minute commute is fine. We also are kinda between part and full time so we won’t be commuting 5 days a week.