Philip Fibiger

Last week Emily was offered, and accepted, a tenure track position as an assistant professor of English Literature at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. While we wouldn’t have picked Florida if we were sitting down looking at a map of the United States, Orlando is the size city we were looking for (smaller than LA, but still big enough to offer great restaurants, shows, that sort of thing), and it’s only a three hour, direct flight to upstate New York. The housing market isn’t nearly as insane as LA; we’ll probably be able to buy something right away.

She starts in August and we’ll probably head down earlier, depending on how my long-distance job hunt goes. If anyone has any leads on tech jobs in the Orlando area, please let me know!

Also, anyone want to buy a half-season old set of snow tires?

Selling my motorcycle didn’t really faze me, neither did removing all our books from our bookshelves and packing them. It was taking our artwork and mirrors off the walls and packing them up is the action that really crystallized that we’re leaving LA, and soon. Our place went from looking like a home to looking like an empty apartment very quickly.

Emily got a Charlotte Newcombe dissertation fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and we decided that it was time to leave LA. We’re going to spend a month driving around the United States, meandering back toward New York State, then we’ll settle into my parents summer place in Newcomb for 6-7 months while we see what happens with the academic job market. I’m going to try to do a little consulting and see what I can get started. After the job hunting process ends for Em in the spring we’ll hopefully go to Europe for a month and then figure out where we go from there.

We’ve got a lot more information about our route at philandemily.com, and we’ll update photos and a travel log there as well. If you have any suggestions for things we shouldn’t miss on our trip or have a floor we can crash on, please drop one of us a line.