On Feb. 14th, a group of 15 Pascack Valley High School students and one Pascack Hills High School student headed on a six-day trip to Iceland. Pascack Valley Science teacher Cindy Reese chaperoned the trip.
Reese frequently visits different countries with students, having chaperoned 24 trips since 2013.
Reese also likes to travel in her personal time. She has been to Iceland seven times—five times with her husband and sister and twice with students.
“Every time you go there’s something new and exciting to see,” Reese explained.
One of her favorite parts of this February trip was getting to see the Northern Lights. This was a shared opinion with many other students on the trip.
Pascack Valley senior Amelia Mitchell talked about her first experience seeing the Northern Lights: “The way they danced, literally danced around in the sky, and [how] they moved and how vibrant they got was really incredible.”
This was Reese’s first time experiencing the Northern Lights with a group of students and only her second time experiencing them at all.
The students on the trip were lucky they were visiting during the winter, as the lights are not visible in the summer.
“In the summer it’s light all the time, right? So, you can’t see them,” Reese said. “So if it wasn’t light all the time you could see them, but since the daylight goes for 24 hours, you can’t.”
A favorite part of the trip for Valley sisters Emma and Abigail Metz was the Gullfoss Waterfall, which is a part of Iceland’s most iconic scenic route: The Golden Circle. The Gullfoss Waterfall features two separate waterfalls that cascade into one and is one of the most popular sights to see while in Iceland.
“It was… so pretty there I could just stare at it forever,” E. Metz said.
The students also took a relaxing trip to Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon before departing for the airport. The water was heated to 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, solely through geothermal energy. The water had high concentrations of silica, which is bad for hair but amazing for skin. Students also received a silica mud mask, so they left for the airport feeling refreshed.
In addition to the incredible experiences they had, students also got a taste of Icelandic cuisine. A popular food item you can get in Iceland is lamb. Iceland is home to around 500,000 sheep, which is more than the human population of Iceland, meaning the price of lamb is lower than in the United States.
“I got 3 [lamb hot dogs] during the trip, one being at a gas station, but they were very good,” Mitchell said. “The meat had a unique mix of lamb in it which gave the meat itself a different flavor, which…to me tastes better.”
I was one of the 15 Valley students on the trip, and I felt that this trip was a really amazing opportunity to explore a new country and become immersed in its nature, which involved a lot of things you wouldn’t typically see in the United States.
One of Mitchell’s biggest takeaways from the trip was from a tour guide speaking about travel about travel: “[He said] ‘Travel is an investment in yourself’ … on day one on our first bus ride, and it stuck with me the whole trip, and that is really a drive-home message about these trips.”
