March, 2019
Almost As North as North Gets
Our Finnish adventure ends in Lapland. Bucket list checklist:
✅ stay in an ice hotel
✅ snowmobile 30 km across a frozen sea at 100km/hour
✅ swim in the sea ice
❎ see the Aurora Borealis
Three out of four is not too bad...we'll catch the Aurora Borealis another time.
A bit of ice fishing for dinner on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Cosy dinner in the Ice Hotel. When the hot food came, it was served in deep bowls in an attempt to keep it warm.
Cross country skiing. Where? On the Gulf of Bothnia of course.
Not cold enough to freeze the drinking water.
Northern Friendly Giant’s chair for two to curl up in.
Bedtime. Thankfully we could turn the lights off.
The ice hotel provides built-in supervision. There will surely be no misbehaving with this babysitter on watch!
100km per hour across the ice to the ice breaker.
The Sampo ice breaker was taken out of service after a mere 25 years because the cargo ships grew too big for the channels Sampo could cut. So now it cuts channels for us.
In case we didn't remember, we were standing on the frozen Gulf of Bothnia.
Boarding has begun!
Cutting through the ice.
Channeling our inner Teletubbies.
Nothing like a beach vacation to take the edge off. The water temperature was around 0-2C but out Teletubby outfits kept us warm, and afloat!
Waterpolo anyone?
Go karting on the ice...at least it's a soft landing.
We are all winners!
Another little snowmobile tour, this time with others who joined our group. The most important rule was to never stop and idle because the heat generated from the engine is not ideal when you're snowmobiling on a frozen sea. Of course, a couple of the people who joined our group got stuck and forced the rest of the line to stop. All those hot snowmobiles stopped in one place for half an hour did not bode well. We started sinking! The guides did double duty and managed to free all the snowmobiles.
Go local!
Here's where we stayed looking for the Aurora Borealis; big windows and a giant skylight to maximize the view. Pretty skies and landscape but the solar flares were not cooperating while we were there.
I know Alex likes camping but in this climate?!