Goodness Glaciers!

For those of you who do not know my middle sister, you will not be meeting her anytime soon. She lives in Iceland. You do not have to re-read. She really does. "What?" You may be asking. "Is that country even inhabited?" Well friends, yes it is. Apparently it is a great place to learn about renewable energy mixed in with a little physics.

Julia and I are 22 months apart and as different as you can imagine. When we were younger, we loved to play together. As we got older, I liked to fix her brown, curly, hair, put make up on her and basically dress her as a doll as much as possible. She still does not wear make up to this day. Regardless, once we realized that we would never have the exact same interests, Julia and I became much closer.

Julia is very science and math oriented. She has excelled in every class she has ever taken and only missed one question on the SATs! Don't worry, my youngest sister and I do not test like that, and no, it is not normal. Anyway, Julia left AL and went to undergrad at UNC. While she was there, she studied abroad in Australia. Again, if you are studying physics, you must travel the world and visit countries everyone dreams of going to. If you are studying psychology, the classes will not vary throughout the world and the United States will be just fine, thank you very much.

All this background to tell you about the amazing trip our family took in April. My parents, youngest sister and Mike packed our bags and headed to Iceland for 10 days. It was one of the most amazing places I have ever visited. Yes, it is cold, but never dropped below 32 degrees while we were there. The winter in St. Louis was colder than that! We rented 2 cars and drove around the entire country, stopping at various sights along the way.

We saw incredible waterfalls:

Walked on glaciers:

and got lost in a lava maze. I have a picture of that, but can't figure out how to turn it counterclockwise.

It is hard to explain or show over pictures how beautiful this country is. Julia was a great tour guide during our adventure, and pushed us to try some of the local cuisine. We ate a lot of lamb, fish and even tried some pigeon! One of the delicacies that we were unable to try is rotten shark. A shark is buried in the ground for a year and then dug up. That's it. That's what you eat. You are then supposed to follow it up with a shot of "The Black Death." We bought a bottle of this before we came home, but I have yet to try it. The name just isn't appealing to me!

We also saw some geothermal hotsprings:

I guess this is part of the reason it is good to study physics here?

Regardless of why, we had a wonderful time. I am so thankful to my parents for generously including us in this trip, and to Julia for being smart enough to be in the program!