The day after we saw The Lights, we had a play with the kick-sleds we’d borrowed from our host, Benko. He advised Greg that they worked best on an icy surface and told him that we should take them down to the road. So yeah, we went and played on the road. Cool.

It’s quite easy to get a good speed up with those things, it’s just that stopping can be a problem. I didn’t need to resort to throwing myself into the snow banks by the side of the road, thankfully. Benko lit the fire in his BBQ hut for us, so we went and sat in there for a while, on the benches lined with reindeer skins around the hut. A bit later in the day, he gave us some moose steak that his wife had shot a few months ago and we had it for dinner, sauteed in butter. By then, we were also watching more Aurora, so we cooked the steak in the cottage rather than down in the BBQ hut.

We went for a walk along one of the cross country ski trails near the cottage. Benko zapped past on skis with his dog Huma, part Husky, part Siberian Laika, to see how his wife was going with her moose hunting. Huma is a good hunting dog, but apparently they had a lot of trouble with her mother, who killed 3 reindeer near their house. The reindeer all belong to the Sami people, and each dead reindeer cost Benko at least AUD$1000. I think that dog has now gone to the big reindeer hunting ground in the sky.

The Aurora on that second night were even better than the previous night. Really vivid and active and amazing. They started just after 5pm, by which time it was completely dark and the moon was just setting, and lasted a couple of hours. Then it got cloudy and while we knew there were probably some spectacular lights happening, we couldn’t see them for the clouds. So that was it, we’ve been lucky enough to see some great Aurora on this trip.

Next day, Wednesday, we drove south towards Lulea. Stopped for lunch at Ikea at Haparanda on the Swedish side of the border with Finland. Ikea is currently renovating their restaurant kitchen, so they were offering a buffet lunch with meatballs, chicken balls and vegie balls plus potato bake & salad. We took a short side-trip back into Finland and south to Kemi, to look at the Snow Castle. We’re too frugal to pay the 15 euros per person to look inside it, let alone stay in the accommodation which starts at 600 euros per night, and we’d already seen its Swedish sister hotel at  Jukkasjarvi on our last trip, so we walked around the outside and past the north-ish facing cabins, er, Seaside Glass Villas,  with huge glass fronts that have obviously been talked-up as being good for viewing aurora. I still have a problem with places that claim it’s possible to see aurora from behind glass. I wouldn’t accuse them of outright lying, but they’re definitely stretching the truth.

And then back to The Old House at Palange, where we stayed for a couple of nights when we first arrived. We like it there, we like Petr the owner and we knew the place and the procedure, so it all worked well for us, with just an hour’s drive to Lulea to return the car and fly south on Thursday afternoon. We were lucky that we could stay there again, as Petr is flying to Czech Republic today to visit his family.

We had some spare time in Lulea so we drove to have a look at the outside of the Facebook Data Centre, just because we could. I was disappointed that there isn’t a huge ‘thumbs-up’ sign at the entrance, just a small sign that said ‘Facebook Entrance’, but we got a photo of Greg standing beside it. As he pointed out, Lulea is the perfect spot for a data centre with all those thousands of computers … no need for airconditioning, just let the outside air in to keep it all cool.

Returning the Volvo at the airport went smoothly – in the 2 weeks we had the car, we drove just over 1000kms, and used less than a full tank of diesel. It cost us just over AUD $100 to fill the car with 51 litres before we returned it, but that was the first time we’d visited a servo on this trip. Great fuel economy

Our flights to Stockholm and then on to Amsterdam were good. We flew Norwegian and got exit row seats to Stockholm, and then seats 1A and 1B on the flight to to Amsterdam. Which is possibly about as close to the pointy end of a plane as we’re going to get. Norwegian offers free wifi, so Greg had a lovely time watching TV shows and surfing the ‘net and seeing where we were flying, all on his phone.

We stayed at the Tulip Inn last night and had a lovely time at their buffet breakfast this morning. Greg wants to move to The Netherlands because they have chocolate sprinkles on bread for breakfast. And he hasn’t even tried the stroopwafels or appelstroop yet!

The sign to the Facebook data centre

Facebook data centre – lots of cool air around to cool those computers

The ice walls of the Snow Castle

The glass villas near the snow castle

The last 8 days in our Finnish cabin in the snow seem to have gone past in a white blur of doing nothing much at all, and having a lovely time doing it. It’s the longest we have ever spent in one place, in the 16 years we’ve been travelling together. We weren’t lucky enough to see any more Lights, but we’re now staying just across the border in Sweden for a few more days, so we might get to see them again. The place we’re staying in now doesn’t have quite the same rustic charm of the previous place, but it is very comfortable and has a great view over the frozen Muonio River, which marks the Swedish/Finnish border. We can see across to Finland from the dining room windows.

While we were at Yllasjarvi, we did a bit of snowshoeing in the partly cleared area behind the cabin. It’s easier than just walking in snow boots, but I still kept managing to get stuck in thigh-deep snow occasionally. Greg gave up on his igloo-building and devoted some of his energy to making time-lapse videos of sunrises, sunsets and other goings-on around the cabin. They are beautiful to watch.

We called in to a Swedish supermarket on our way here to stock up on essentials that we couldn’t find in Finland – creamed rice and little hot dog buns – and learnt that older Swedish banknotes and coins are no longer legal tender. Some were phased out in the middle of last year, and others will be phased out in the middle of this year. I’d brought about 170 SEK (AUD $25 ) that I’d had left over from when we were here 3 years ago, and 2 x 20 kroner notes are now obsolete. The young woman at the checkout offered to exchange the rest of the notes and coins for me but I’ll just make sure we spend it all before we leave. I guess we’ll add the 20 kroner notes to Greg’s Zimbabwean 1 trillion dollar note, which is also no longer accepted as legal tender. There seems to be a move towards a cashless economy in Sweden – when we had brunch at Ikea last weekend, it was not possible to pay with cash, only with a plastic card as the checkout operator didn’t have a cash drawer.

We had another go at snow-shoeing on Monday and managed to get down to the nearby river. It’s still hard to get through deep snow in snow shoes, but easier than just wearing boots. When we came back inside we watched a Youtube video and we’d worked it out pretty well by ourselves, although we didn’t try anything tricky like going up or down hills, or over tree stumps. In the afternoon we drove the 5kms to Yllasjarvi, the nearest village, and visited the supermarket. There’s a large lake jarvi which is currently frozen, and we have seen people with dog sleds out on it. The ski resort is near the village and there is also a hotel and other accommodation, a service station and a place that rents out snow mobiles, skis and other snow-related gear. In the summer they probably cater for people wanting to use the lake for swimming, kayaking etc.

It has snowed a couple of times since we got here on Saturday – on Sunday night, and again today, Wednesday. A snowplough came by on Monday afternoon and cleared the road and also our driveway, which was handy.

Greg’s attempts to build an igloo continue. He abandoned the first one that he’d started on Sunday as it snowed a lot on Monday and partially filled the inside. He tried again yesterday, but it was a really cold day and it wasn’t possible to be outside for too long. It got down to -20C yesterday – it was a gorgeous day with clear sky and sunshine, but of course there was absolutely no warmth in the sun at all. It did make for some nice photos, though. I stayed inside the whole day; the closest I got to going outside was to nip out to the enclosed porch where all the snow shoes, toboggans and other winter gear is kept to check the temperature every few hours.

Today was a much milder day, with very overcast sky and occasional snow. Temp this morning was around -10C, and now at 9pm, it is currently 2C. We drove 40kms to Kitilla, the town to the north of here, to have lunch and do some grocery shopping. There is an airport there. We found a pub which claimed to have a cafe that served burgers and kebabs, but after a minor miscommunication in which we thought we were asking the publican where the cafe was, and him bringing us 2 cups of coffee, we learnt that the cafe is currently closed. So we went and had burgers & fries at one of the servos.

No Northern Lights action at the moment, but there is something predicted for the 27th or 28th.

Meanwhile, we’re loving this cabin we’re staying in, and we’re really happy to be spending a week here. When we leave here on Sunday, we’ve booked another one just across the border in Aareavaara in Sweden for 3 nights. It’s only about 70kms from here.

The cabin after even more snow

Snowshoeing

The car got covered by about 4cm of snow

cutting snow blocks for the igloo

An attempt at an igloo wall

Snow plowing the driveway

Sunrise at 11am

Judy inside in the warm while outside its -18C

Shopping for supplies in Kittilä

the choices of Reindeer meat

After settling in to our Finnish cabin in the snow and exploring it – you know, opening cupboards and drawers, switching lights on and off and on and off, finding power points, moving furniture and making a mental note of where it was originally so we can put it back the way it was when we leave next weekend – Greg checked his favourite Aurora websites to see what was happening, and what they were predicting. It looked like we might see some Lights in the early hours of Sunday morning and the sky was clear, so if there was anything happening, we’d probably see it.

Our bladders always take longer than the rest of our bodies to get used to a new timezone, so when we were awake at 1am, we figured we might as well don all the layers of clothing and go outside to have a look. And … there they were! We’d left some lights on in the house, so we nipped back inside to put even more clothes on and turn the lights off, then walked down a path away from the road to an area behind the house with fewer trees and a better view of the sky. There’s a ski resort a few kms from here and its lights were still blazing, but we were able to stand and look at the sky without those lights interfering. Looking north, we could see a band of light above the horizon, not super-bright, and not really much colour, but it moved and it really was The Northern Lights! We stood and watched for 30 minutes or so, until they moved away from where we could see them well, so we went back inside to warm up.

That’s been it for seeing Northern Lights so far. Last night it was cloudy and there was no aurora activity predicted. It started snowing some time during the night, and is still snowing now, at 10:30am.

A bad picture of the Northern Lights

The cabin in the Finnish Woods

Judy snowshoeing

It snowed covering the Volvo

Inside the cabin with the fire going

Where we are in Finland