I second that the towns of Wallingford and Concord are vastly different. As a parent of two very different to each other kids, one who is at a Gow in Buffalo, NY and the other will go to Middlesex, it depends on the kid and the school. Gow has Saturday classes, super scheduled, my Gow son prefers downtime be quiet, in his room, preferably alone. So a nice dorm room is more important to him with food delivery if possible. He wishes the restaurants were better when we go out to eat there. But otherwise, he doesn’t care. The school does organize a lot of activities out of the school. And I think it changes for the high schoolers. He is in 8th grade there.
My older son prefers to spend his free time exploring things, outdoorsy and cultural. When we visited Choate and MX, he did make an observation that he thought Concord is nicer than Wallingford (I’ve tried to get him to join this forum). I’m not sure how he will get into town, but my understanding when we visited the schools were that there would be school organized activities into surrounding towns, big cities, if possible. Also, you will likely make friends with day students and possibly visit them at their homes. That being said though, MX also has a nice outdoorsy campus. The pond, forest, etc. Those features also appealed to my son. He likes cross-country skiing and archery as well and I think MX offers that. He will be doing at least 2 team sports at MX, so he won’t have a lot of extra time because of team travel. He has also looked at the clubs and arts at MX and is excited by it all.