The Geography of Europe: Part I - Introduction and the Nordic Countries

Let's face it--those of us who call the United States home tend to have a reputation for being extremely bad at geography. This notion is so prevalent that LastWeekTonight host John Oliver loves making light of it to hilarious effect:

While Mr. Oliver's bit is really quite funny, let's change this stereotype and start learning the locations of the rest of the countries in this world! We'll start with Europe--it might be the easiest as I would hope most of us know where at least some European nations are located. Since Europe has so many countries, I'll be breaking this up into a few posts in order to cover each region in depth. In this post, I'll introduce the continent and also delve into one region--the Nordic states.

I'm Still Here!

Apologies for the lack of posts.  I have not abandoned this blog!  I've been super busy the past few weeks - I have an 8 month old baby who is discovering her newfound ability to climb on things, is trying to crawl, and teething on top of all that - so I've been working on reorganizing my house to suit her better (and baby-proof). 
I promise, though, that I have been working on a new post as much as I can in those little moments of spare time!  I just have to work on getting my visual aids up to the quality that I want them, and then everything should be ready.  Plus, this upcoming post will be the start of a bigger lesson that will be broken up into smaller, easy-to-digest pieces.
Expect more in the coming weeks!  Thank you for your patience!  I have no intentions of abandoning this project - I really enjoy working on it and I hope you all like following along with me!