Lapland

Like two rather excitable children (well, one very excitable child and another moderately excited one) we set off to meet Santa Claus. Unfortunately Santa has decided to charge a minimum of €20 to buy the official meet-and-greet photo, and has banned other cameras in his grotto. Therefore we got the next best thing; Si hopped into a small window display while Sarah kept watch and took the snap. It was very tempting to purchase the video the elves recorded of Santa making Sarah do a little dance, but we decided against shelling out €50 (especially as there are probably already many video clips in existence of Sarah doing a little jig).


The Northern Lights were not bright enough to capture on our little camera but were quite spectacular. They are not very colourful this time of year (mostly pale yellow) but were quite bright on a couple of nights; on one occasion forming a huge arc across the sky and then developing a circle with finger like projections radiating out from the middle and dancing across the sky.

Due to the poor quality of regular coffee, and high price of good coffee, we "resorted" to filling our faces with lots of chocolate milk, and were especially amused by this particular brand...


The infrastructure on the hiking paths was really high quality here. It is probably more of a matter of life and death to have good facilities in remote areas due to the winter weather, but they were available for use all year round. Each hut or lean-to had either a wood burning stove or stone fireplace, a big pile of wood, and robust shelter. The huts also had gas stoves with full fuel bottles.


And just in case you were starting to get concerned about the lack of silliness on our trip, here is the obligatory photo of Sarah doing something random on a break in the bus journey to Inari....