Older millennial here. Moved to Salem a decade ago when rents and home/condo prices were reasonable (at least compared to Boston, where we had moved from). We rented with the expectation that once we saved up money and were further along in our careers, we would buy a condo or modest home.

Now we make about 150K combined but still live in the small $1500 a month apartment we rented when we were struggling financially. While we could technically afford to buy a condo in the area, we aren't super motivated to do so. Our apartment is small and in an old building, but it has 3 bedrooms (our daughter has one room and we use the 3rd as an office), is RIGHT on the ocean as well as downtown, and comes with free parking and heat/water included. It is just SO cheap for the area and gives us so much more saving and spending money. It's hard to be motivated to spend $500k on a modest fixer upper condo that comes with hundreds of dollars of monthly HOA fees, and be house poor, vs now when housing is such a relatively minor expense for us. Also, living in a walkable downtown and on the ocean, it doesn't matter so much having a small apartment with no yard when you can easily spend most of your day outside your home doing other things in your neighborhood and socializing with others.

My family has lived in and around Salem since immigrating from Italy in 1900. We just love the area, and it is convenient to get to work in Boston. We have looked at other towns on the North and South shore, but we'd have to be moving significantly west in the state to be able to afford buying even a decent condo at this point, never mind a SFH. At this point, although we will at the very least upgrade to a larger apartment in the foreseeable future, we're strongly considering staying in Salem and renting forever, or maybe getting a condo once my boss retires in a few years because she's mentoring me to be her replacement and then I'll get another good salary bump.

Portsmouth, NH is another great walkable coastal town north of Boston with a great food scene.

I loved Stacy Schiff's prize winning Cleopatra biography, and I live in Salem and have read a bunch of trial related books, but I found her "Witches" book very dry and difficult to get through, although it did have some interesting new information regarding some of the accusers and their standing within the community, and how this related to their accusations and those they accused, and how it wasn't necessarily a simple case of accusers = villains and accused = victims. If you had already read a bunch on the trials and were looking for even more exhaustive information, I think "Witches" was worthwhile, but I wouldn't recommend it as a first book to read about the trials.

Personally my favorite book on the trials is Frances Hill's "A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story Of The Salem Witch Trials." I found this to be the best combination of a comprehensive historical overview and readability; I found this book very hard to put down, the opposite of Schiff's. After that I recommend reading "A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience" by Emerson Baker, which looks at the trials in a larger context of early American history and Puritanism.

Are there any better options for parking the bike at or around Worcester's commuter rail station?