Yesterday, on Christmas morning, we woke up at the decent time of 8am, reminisced briefly about all the years of early Christmas morning awakenings when we had little people in our lives, and then got down to the business of exchanging presents. I gave Greg a soft-sided, powered fridge bag, which he knew about and wanted, plus a signed limited first edition of Donna Tartt’s latest book The Goldfinch. We are both reading it at the moment and enjoying it very much. I also slipped in a copy of the South America on the Cheap Lonely Planet guide as we have been talking about going there next.

Greg gave me a book on the Northern Lights. Now, Greg is always a very good present-giver, so I had a suspicion that there might be more to it than just a book about something we thought we might like to do some day, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful by shaking the book to see if anything would fall out. So I looked through it page by page until he gave up waiting for me to say something like ‘wouldn’t it be great to see this’ and brought out our itinerary. Oh. My. Goodness. Plane tickets to Stockholm this Friday. In 2 ½ days. In 60 hours. Unbelievable. Incredible. And probably the Best. Present. Ever.

He has been planning it for weeks – working out the best time to go in terms of the sun and moon cycles, the best place to go that will give us the best chance of seeing the Lights, car hire, warm clothes, guide book on how to camp in the snow. Because yes, we’ll be camping inside the Arctic Circle in winter … as you do. Well, actually most of you probably don’t … but we do. Of course we’ll let you know how it all goes, with pictures.

The soft-sided fridge bag will come with us …. but that’s so that we can stop our food from freezing, as opposed to keeping it cold! We have a small mountain of camping gear, clothes, tent, and assorted other paraphernalia to go through and pack. But that’s okay, we don’t fly out until late tomorrow night. Plenty of time.