northern lights
The rest of summer was spent doing a quick trip to NZ for a 40th, moving house (two small words, one HUGE projects with all the renovations!), and the obligatory junk or two!
In September we headed to Finland for a few days with a big goal of ticking off a major bucket list item… seeing the Northern Lights. Similar to Estonia we didn’t have much of a plan when we arrived, we transited in Helsinki and flew straight to “Santas home town” of Rovaniemi. We grabbed a rental car and headed north, followed our nose a bit and tried to find interesting places to stay where we could easily get to areas without light pollution.
We absolutely loved Finland, the countryside was lovely to drive in, I found it crazy to see Reindeer grazing the way you’d see cows in New Zealand! Food was delicious, cafes were cute, locals were super interesting and friendly in their unique way. We managed to squeeze in lots of awesome outdoor activities to entertain ourselves while we waited for night to fall to go light-spotting. One day we visited an amethyst mine (where we successfully found some pieces to take home), another we mountain biked through an epic national park. We did a guided kayak trip which ended with a sauna and cooking hot dogs over an open fire right by the river. Our favourite accom was the glass roofed igloo and we had an awesome evening in the forest one night, cooking dinner over a fire and waiting for the lights.
In terms of light spotting, sometimes we were driving round at night, sometimes hiking up mountains (once to an epic hut!). We used a website which would warn us if the lights were showing and it had felt a little flakey the first couple of nights, telling us the lights were there but we couldn’t see them. But finally it paid off as we were sitting at dinner one night and it alerted us, we almost didn’t go outside as the other alerts hadn’t meant much but thought “may as well just in case” and WOW there they were dancing above us, we told the waitress we’d be back and rushed to get our warm gear on and get back outside. Holy heck, it’s hard to explain how epic the lights are, I was mesmerised, dinner be damned! They put on a totally great show for us and I could have gone home happy at that point honestly. However we still had a couple of nights to go and were lucky enough to see the lights a few more times while we were there. They came in different shapes, sizes and intensities and sometimes we were looking from epic spots on top of hills, other times craning our necks to see them out the car windows. But my favourite was coming back to the glass igloo and lying in bed watching them dance above us, I truly didn’t want to go to sleep.
As a farewell gift, winter arrived on our last day - we woke up to a sprinkling of snow which quickly started to pile up and we got a fully snowy day for our travel back to the airport, loved seeing this side of Finland but very happy it just hit on the last day!
Finland is a huge country, and we only saw such a teeny tiny part of it, we’re already talking about when we’ll be back, and we’re shooting for winter next time as we think it’ll be totally magical with a full coat of snow.
