Anyway - fast forward a decade and I just can't get enough of rural living - from the safe distance of my town home. The CAL Ranch store, horses across the street and did you know we have our own rodeo ground? The other day I saw a guy at Autozone with spurs on his boots! Wait... now I sound like I'm obsessed with cowboys, not small towns. I digress. The point I am trying to make is that small towns have their own little flavour that you just don't find a city or the suburbs. And our new(ish) home of Spanish Fork is no exception. This is what I hope to illustrate in my new blog series, Know Your Fork:
In our quest towards becoming Spanish Fork locals we visited the illustrious Icelandic Memorial. Now, as I'm sure you were all keenly aware of, Spanish Fork proudly boasts the first permanent Icelandic settlement in the United States, commemorated by this memorial.

Because it's not a very big memorial, it didn't take us very long to bask in its Scandinavian glory, so here are some of the highlights:
-First there was the commemorative monument which is actually pretty cool, especially when you take the random house in the background out of the equation. I got all nerdily excited about how much Icelandic I could understand, and it was nice to feel the Scandinavian connection. When you're from where I'm from, you've got to take what you can get.

-Then they had a big chunk of volcanic rock from Iceland which, seeing as Iceland itself is made up entirely of volcanic rock, was like a little piece of Iceland. A little piece of Iceland that had blasted out of the earth's mantle, become part of a country, then been picked up and transported 3777 miles to sit at the intersection of 400 South and 800 East in Spanish Fork, UT.

-And finally, there was the big, stone "lighthouse" memorial. I tried very hard to get a photo of it with the Icelandic flag in the background, but the wind wouldn't cooperate. You can get a better idea of what it looks like in the first picture, I just liked this one:

It also seems there is an Icelandic Festival in Spanish Fork every June, to which we will have to go. Especially seeing as we just missed Thorrablót 2009...
This has been "Know Your Fork".