Poppinga Ln, Hyde Park

Poppinga Lane in Hyde Park sits near the Hudson River and is a very tree-lined, short street that ends at the water. It's a road that's actually a little bit out of the way, as you'll have to navigate some side streets and cross over the train tracks to find it, but once you do, you won't see many houses.

Of the three I could identify, only one is relatively affordable at about $340,000, though nothing on this road is up for sale as of summer 2012. The other two are pushing a million bucks, and they're pretty big. You're going to pay to live along the river, and that's Poppinga Lane.

When you finally get out of the back roads from here and onto the highways, you'll still be a little while away from things. The hospitals and shopping aren't close; the schools aren't horribly far and neither are some restaurants. There are also parks nearby as well as the two homesteads, Vanderbilt and FDR. Of course, you have the available recreation of the Hudson River right at your fingertips.

I would imagine that it's usually fairly quiet around here, but the train is going to come through several times a day. I don't know if it'll be with horn blaring or what, but at only a few hundred feet away, you will probably notice.

It probably sounds more isolated than it actually is, but you're not in the thick of a big neighborhood. In fact, there really isn't much of a neighborhood around here. Not many houses stand on this street and the train tracks really separate you from the other side streets in the general vicinity. It's also not the kind of place for those on fixed incomes, unless it's fixed at something quite high.