Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

 Happy Birthday to Mark, and he wrote this post.  One of the benefits of traveling to snowy northern Norway is that there are a plethora of winter activities to do.   Besides the usual skiing/snowboarding, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling, there are also things more unique to Tromsø, such as reindeer sleigh rides and dogsledding.   We went dogsledding twice during our Norway travels.   This is the story of the first of those adventures.   The dogsledding company of our first experience is located at the Tromsø Golf Club, the northernmost 18-hole golf course in the world.  Buried in snow in the winter, it becomes the perfect place for an amazing dogsledding experience.  The dogsledding company runs shuttle busses from Tromsø city center to the dogsledding camp.  It takes about an hour to get there and the views along the way are spectacular. The noise on arrival was also spectacular.   They have well over 100 dogs there and they all want to talk to each other at full volume. The dogs

 A lot of days when we were in Norway, some tour we had scheduled was cancelled due to weather, which meant we went around downtown Tromso checking out what indoor  activities they had. Being the nerds that we are, we chose the museums over the paintballing. somewhere in downtown Tromso cod tongue Our first night in Tromso, after our first Northern Lights excursion was cancelled, I convinced Mark to go to a museum down the street from our hotel instead of turning in super early [we were jet-lagged]. It was actually a hybrid restaurant-museum called Full Steam, with a self-guided [via QR-codes] tour of the owner's private collection of Sami and Arctic paraphernalia on the top floor, and a guided tour of sections of the restaurant. The building was originally a fish warehouse, so we learned more about the historic fishing industry [while eating caviar and cod tongue] and how fish were processed from the net to the drying racks. Considering I never would have eaten cod tongue or drunk

 When I told my mother I was going to the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights, she thought I would die of cold. This was more from her knowledge of my poor cold tolerance than from a belief that all the people who live in the Arctic Circle are dead. While I myself was worried that I would freeze, and Mark was convinced I would complain frequently about how cold I was, I insisted we go because I saw great beauty even in the concept  of the Aurora Borealis. The Northern [and Southern] Lights exist because of solar wind's interactions with Earth's magnetic fields, which protect us from the harmful charged particles. The "weak" area in our magnetosphere is at the poles, so that's where we see the Auroras. Basically, one of the most beautiful nature displays on Earth is due to vulnerability. I find that profound. What I did not realize is that seeing the Northern Lights is more of a chase/hunt than something you show up and see. We saw the aurora our first night h

Random Fact: My FIL likes to sing "Northward! to Alaska!" whenever it seems appropriate--which means whenever North is mentioned.  Well, Mark and I went North. This is the library. While the main goal of this (finally successful!) Norway trip was to see the Northern Lights, and we theoretically could have done that in Alaska, Norway is more exciting. Any out-of-country travelling is exciting, because you get to see a much different culture, lifestyle, and maybe even foreign-language use that really makes the experience more memorable. For example, neither Mark nor I could pronounce any of the towns we went to, or read any of the road signs we passed. [Important note: while basically everybody in Norway speaks English, the road signs--at least in Northern Norway--are exclusively in Norwegian, and most museum exhibits/menus/library book collections have limited English translations/options].  I've been to Norway before, but it was southern Norway and 10 years ago, so I didn