To all our family and friends reading, and to anyone who just happens to find us here, we wish you all a very Happy, healthy and rewarding 2014. I hope it’s a very good year for us all.

We spent New Year’s Eve staying at a hotel in Lulea, a town near the top of the Gulf of Bothnia. We have been driving up the east coast of Sweden, and will head inland and go north-west today. Our destination is the Abisko National Park, which is a very good place to see The Lights because of its proximity to a large lake with mountains behind it, and it’s isolated so there’s no problem with any artificial light pollution. Greg has been watching websites that monitor solar activity and it’s all looking very promising for the next day or so.

When we arrived at the hotel yesterday, in the middle of the night at 6pm, we chatted with the receptionist and she told us that it had only started snowing there yesterday, which is very late in the season. A guy in Stockholm told us the same thing – that is was very rare to have clear, fine days in December … and no snow. I guess we’ll go back to a very different, snowy Stockholm to the one we left a few days ago, where it was a bit cold and everything was damp, but still easy to get around.

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