During the Christmas season, there are two types of lights that illuminate the skies over Iceland; the Northern Lights and Fireworks. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to experience both this week. The Christmas season in Iceland starts at the beginning of December and goes through January 6th. Unlike in America, when one can find disgarded…

Yesterday, we drove about 3 hours into the Southeast of Iceland towards the Solheimajokull Glacier. We had booked a glacier hiking tour and were instructed to meet at the parking lot by 12pm. We left a litte early so we would get a chance to stop off at the nearby waterfall in Skogar, just the…

Appropriate title for my first post about Iceland. With approximately 4 hours of daylight a day in December and January, I wondered why exactly I had decided to come here in the middle of the winter. Of course, the lure of seeing the Northern Lights would be at the top of that list, but also,…

Bucket lists. Everyone has them, but they are a special part of a traveler's life. Just as we cross one amazing adventure off the list, we add another, to the point where it sometimes seems impossible to satisfy our insatiable appetites for new experiences and places visited. At the top of my bucket list since…

This past weekend I traveled to Boston, one of my favorite U.S. cities, to attend the annual National Council for Social Studies Conference. I arrived a few days earlier than usual as this is my first year as a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia and I wanted to attend the CUFA (College and University…

As my birthday vacation with my mom winds down, this famous Casablanca quote comes to mind. I know when I return to Paris again someday, I will remember this trip fondly. Our last few days in Paris were mostly relaxing, not over-filled with sightseeing and discussin the agri-business in Illinois, but rather, spent leisurely meadering…

For the last seven days, my home has been the River Baroness, a river boat on which we slowly cruised our way down the Seine, from Paris to Normandy. The country side is beautiful, and every so often a village would pop up, with thatch-roofed houses and spired churches sitting up on a hill. As…

As part of our trip to Paris, my mom and I decided to book a tour on one of those fancy river cruises that you often seen advertised during shows like, say, Downton Abbey. Well beyond my normal means of travel, I was afraid I would be the youngest person by a solid thirty years…

Ernest Hemingway said this while living in Paris as a young man during the 1920s. It is not difficult to imagine what the city must have been like during that time, when American writers and artists infiltrated the city, producing some of the best literary works of the twentieth century. The Paris of the “lost…

Our last few days in Japan were very hectic, traveling from Hiroshima to Tokyo for one short night, then down to Fukushima for a night, then back to Tokyo for the last two nights. Exhausted, we hopped on and off of trains and buses, experiencing some highpoints,as well as some lowpoints along the way. Tokyo:…