My future home?

I put together a little mosiac of images of the city of New Paltz and the physics department. I am not really happy with this mosaic-maker, so if any of you all know of a good one let me know (mac or web based).


It happened to be overcast when I finally had some free time, but the other days it was really quite lovely, so the town wasn't as dreary as this looks. In order from left to right, top to bottom, this is: a view of the mountains from campus - there is a nice resort by that cliff and tower in the distance, one of the really old homes from the Huguenot era, a nice recreational trail running through the city, main street, a nice building, two stores in colorful houses (homemade soap and knitting supplies), the iconic campus building with bell tower, main street again, a pretty berry tree on campus, the (not pretty) physics building, a faculty office (wall of window!), me giving my talk, the hiring committee and Dean at my talk (they asked for these last pictures, I didn't take them for fun), and the physics students at my talk.

All in all I would say that it is a charming little city. I did set aside a morning intending to explore the village and it only took about 15 minutes to walk the whole thing. Twice. I did find a decent mexican restaurant, so that's good. And there's an Entenmann's bakery outlet on the outskirts, dangerous. I got a visitor's guide at the airport which tells me that the population of the Village of New Paltz is 6,034 and the surrounding Town of New Paltz (the burbs I suppose, though still a 15 minute walk from campus) is 12,830 people. That means that the whole place put together has less people than half of the student population at UT. Even if those numbers don't include the New Paltz students so we throw in another 6,000 that makes the whole place just barely more than half of the student population of UT. Wow. So yeah, definitely a life change. But both Poughkeepsie and Kingston are about 25 minutes away, so I could go there for my shopping and population craves (I'd have to learn to spell Poughkeepsie). And of course NYC is only about an hour and a half away, and the train does go to New Paltz.

So, that could be my future home. I'm a little bit undecided on if I want to live there. I think there could be a lot of great advantages to small town life. But I could also go bored out of my mind. In the end I might not have a choice, depending on what my job offers are!