We loved the apartment we stayed in in North Bergen. It was beautiful and quiet. Paying to park with Claudia was well worth it. The parking spot was right behind the apartment building, so it was easy to load and unload our luggage. (We weren't sure how far away it was going to be.) One of the people in the apartment building told us this was a safe neighborhood, which was true as much as we observed. One piece of advice I would give would be how to get to New York City from the apartment. On the first day you are going have $1 dollar bills and quarters, so that you can pay the bus driver with cash. When we were there it was $2.50 per person, but it might change. There is an app to use, but it is not user friendly. We were trying to buy tickets, but it was asking us where we were starting from and our bus stop was not a choice. It was also asking what zone we were in which we had no clue. (We were in Zone 2). Claudia had some information in the apartment about bussing, but it was outdated. So if on the first day you just pay cash to get to New York City the bus will take you to the Port Authority which is the main hub in NYC for all busses and subways. Once you are there you can buy a 10 ride pass for the New Jersey bus system, which is very helpful because you can share it with your family--they give you 10 tickets. They have machines or live people to buy from, but make sure you buy the NJ tickets for the bus. It also helps to find out when the bus is returning to NJ at night. It seemed to leave every 45 minutes after 8 pm at night. It is also a little tricky to find where it leaves from, so you might want to find it before you leave the Port Authority, so that when you come back later it won't be stressful to catch the bus home. Once in NYC we walked most places or used the subway. When buying a Metro Card for the subway we found that the machines did not like our Visa chip cards. We could usually buy one or two cards, and then the chip card wouldn't work anymore. (it worked other places just not in the Metro Card kiosks). There weren't any places we could find in the Port Authority where you could buy one from a live person. Many of the smaller subway stations had people that you could talk to to get directions, which was very helpful since we normally knew which direction we wanted to go, but sometimes we just needed the reassurance or didn't really know. We used the GPS on our phone a lot, but it could be confusing.