Fast forward to when we went back to Michigan. Mom ordered a ton (not literally a ton, but a lot) of 1 - 2 inch stones from the gravel pit to fill the barn floor with so it wasn't just dirt. Before we shoveled it all in there you would be able to find me out there digging through the pile looking for cool rocks. Turns out there was a ton of fossils in there. I still have my little baggy of fossils.
Now let's move a little bit further in the time scale to 2009-ish. Family vacation was going to Lake Powell that year. We ended up renting a speed boat and parking it on an island made of small rocks. I was laying out on the float digging through the water and rocks looking for the cool ones. I ended up with one of the large coolers full of rocks. I can only imagine to look on the TSA people when they saw it was full of rocks, haha!
Family vacation 2012 was on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. This was about a week before college was set to start and there I was, as an 18 year old child digging through the surf and the sand for cool rocks. At this time I was still undecided so mom suggested that I try geology, and I guess you could say the rest is history.
By the time I started to remember things, I had already been bitten by the travel bug. Moving from place to place as a youngster certainly added to my gypsy blood. Before I started preschool I had already been to a handful of states and lived in smaller handful of them.
My goal was to go to all 50 states by the time I was 20. That is obviously not going to happen since I am going to be 20 at the end of May (2014). So 31 out of 50 isn't that bad considering I have the difficult ones, Alaska and Hawaii, checked off the list.
