If you're willing to consider a half an hour commute, you might want to look 
into Lawrence, Ks. It's a college town, home of the University of Kansas, you 
may have heard of their basketball team.

Lawrence is a nice place to live, with a vibrant downtown retail area. The 
school system is pretty good. Since it's a college town, there's always 
something going on. If you're a person that likes to go out there's plenty of 
bars. There are three (soon to be two) museums on campus, one art museum and 
one natural history museum, the museum of anthropology is going away.

There's decent lake 20 minutes west of town if you enjoy fishing or boating 
and another large lake 20 minutes northwest of town.

There's also a river that divides the north part of town from the south part. 
There are trails along the river for hiking and biking.

In the summertime, there are outdoor band concerts in the large park adjacent 
to the downtown. The public pool was revamped a few years back and includes 
water slides, a walk in area and lots of great fountains for the kids. There's 
an indoor aquatic center at the new high school as well.

Lawrence is not a really big place, 70K+ if you count the 29K students about 
10K of which stay here year round. In the summer, the traffic thins out since 
20K students go home.

The housing market has been insane here for the last decade or so, with 
people's houses going up 6 - 10% a year on average.

We're getting our first Home Depot and a Best Buy soon. They are slated to 
open in May, I believe.

Good luck.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com

The Lord prefers common-looking people.  That is the reason that He makes
so many of them.
		-- Abraham Lincoln