The quest for the Northern Lights

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We only had one thing in mind when booking this holiday, and that was to see the Northern Lights.
We researched on the internet where we would be able to see it and what was the best time of year. We found out a lot of things about Tromso - where the most Northern University in the world is located. The best time of the year is in winter during the new moon phase.
With all the information in hand, we booked our holiday and were really excited when the day to leave finally arrived.
We flew to Oslo and spent the first night there, and that's when we watched our first Ice Hockey game - it was fun appart from the fact that we couldn't understand the rules and that or team lost.
The next day we flew to Tromso. There wasn't much day light when we arrived, even though it was 12 Noon, and outside the airport it looked so cold. It was actually -5, not as cold as we imagined, and that's probably because it was cloudy - our hopes of seeing the Lights were starting to dim.
Nevertheless, we were really excited, after all we were above the Arctic Circle and there was snow everywhere. We were in awe when we arrived in town and everything was absolutely covered with snow - we new we would have some fun even if we couldn't see the Lights.
The first night was completely overcasted so we had big hopes that the next night would be clear. Unfortunately the second day was also cloudy and we gave up hopes of seeing anything - at least we had fun playing in the snow. We went for dinner, Tom even got to watch the Chelsea game (unbelievable!!) and when we were leaving the Pub we realized that the sky had cleared and we could see all the stars - from that moment we were on a mission. We ran home, we had to find a dark place - you can't see the lights in the city. Our B&B was outside town and we ran all the way looking up, and when we were on our street we saw a green line in the sky - it was really cool but obviously we wanted more. We saw a little more with green and yellow and decided to go home to get into our snow clothes and go back outside and that's when the B&B's owner asked the horrible question "Did you see the Aurora? About an hour ago it was green, red, yellow.....very strong!". We were so disappointed, we had just missed it. We went out again and spent an hour looking at the sky, but no luck, it was gone.
We spent one more day in Oslo which gave us the opportunity to have a look at the mountains, the famous ski jump and the Vigeland Sculpture Park where you can find 200 sculptures made by Gustav Vigeland - the park is Vigeland's life work.
Tom had hoped for snow the whole holiday and when we were walking to the Park it finally started snowing and it didn't stop for quite a while - we had a lot of fun!
It was a great holiday, we didn't get to see what we actually were looking for, but had fun anyway!

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