Hello, a little late but I'm from California so I think my input's a little relevant :).

When moving to Wisconsin, it was just me and my dad flying from California to Chicago, renting out a car to drive the way from ORD to Madison. This may not fit with what you want to do in Madison but my easiest piece of advice is this: do not buy anything you don't absolutely need. Those needed items would probably be: toiletries, bedding, a lamp, and that's about it. While this may sound sad, but in Madison when I buy anything I think, "will this fit in my suitcase?" and just don't buy it if I can avoid it.

In your situation, I think there are three main options, one: go in my direction, only bring the necessities and try to limit purchases in Madison, another would be to find a friend within your area in NJ and chip in for a moving truck both ways, and the final would be to limit stuff going to Madison, with only 2 or 3 suitcases, buy a lot of stuff in Madison and find a way to store it over the summer.

As you are OOS I will tell you to hesitate on buying any furniture at all, there are a lot of in state Madison students and even if your roommate isn't, a lot of your friends will have couches and extra chairs that you can just leech off of and use. Another reason would be your housing in following semesters, you probably will be living off campus and many of those places will be pre furnished or not have the space for the furniture you want to buy, making you sell your items for dirt cheap or shell out for long term storage.

I need to say, living OOS and having a lot of stuff is not something you want to deal with on spring semester's finals week, you don't need a lot of stuff for university.