Town or Country?

We're deciding where to live. My husband's company is in a (supposedly - I haven't seen it) picturesque village called Saffron Walden, about 20 miles outside of Cambridge. So we could live in Saffron Walden, or it would be an easy commute by train or car from Cambridge. Town or country? They both have their merits:

Town
more schools within an easy distance
closer access to shops and activities
easy to get around without a car

Country
charm of living in a country home
more space, both in the home and garden
less traffic, crowding

I have a feeling this is not the street we'll be living on in Cambridge. I do hope to find a cute row house ("terraced house" if I'm going to attempt to go all British English) though. Sadly, my husband has not taken any photos of the Saffron Walden area for me to share.

It's been a hard decision, but I think we are going to try to get a place centrally located in Cambridge. One motivation is that we can get around without a car. My husband can easily walk to the train station and take the train to work. I will be able to walk, bike and take the bus around town. Learning to drive on the other side of the road scares me! It's all the moments of driving when you're not concentrating but get around just fine based on all your experience and instincts that give me pause: my experience and instincts will be all wrong. I also like that living in Cambridge will make it easy to use Zipcar, a car sharing company. You pay an hourly or daily rate to rent the car that includes gas and insurance. It would save us all the hassle of buying and then selling a car, in addition to figuring out parking and insurance.

The other reason I think the city will work for us is schools. From what I can tell, England has a school system that doesn't guarantee that your child will get into their neighborhood school. If this happens, in Cambridge we'll have other convenient options. If we didn't get into the Saffron Walden schools, we'd be stuck driving a long way every day to get the kids to school.

Now we're just waiting for my husband's work visa to be complete before signing a rental contract. Just having the decision made feels like an accomplishment.

Countdown

Four months until we set sail for England. Only a few things to accomplish between now and then:

rent house in the U.S.
decide where to live in England - countryside or city?
contact UK schools to see if any prayer of getting the girls enrolled
decide on transportation - lease, buy, use car share program, try to use public transportation?
rent place to live in England
sort belongings between stuff to bring and stuff to store
find storage company
find shipping company
sort out steps of bringing our cat
change all bills to online billing
make changes to home and car insurance
clean house and sort any and all little repairs
buy airline tickets

An adventure is born

Some years ago my husband's company bought a company located outside Cambridge, England. "Wouldn't it be great," we said, "if you could work out of the England office for a year?" We have lived outside the U.S. before. We spent a year in France back before kids. It was fabulous - the bakeries! the people! the countryside! the travel opportunities! the cheese shops! Just one little problem - we didn't speak French. Oh, you'll pick it up in no time living there everyone said. Not so. The stress of going around talking like a somewhat slow 4-year-old wore us down. We loved it, but were ready to go home when our year was up. Now almost 15 years later we get this opportunity again for living abroad, this time speaking English! We're so excited. I have many romantic notions of what life will be like living in England. I'm ready to test how many of my romantic, Anglophile visions hold up to real life in England.