Blogs from Jukkasjärvi, Norrbotten County, Sweden, Europe

How cool are these pictures? We're so proud of them, they truly reflect what we saw – curtains of green and red light rippling across the sky. At times the lights were so active you just didn't know where to look, you were surrounded by them. And to see red – I've only seen green northern lights before so seeing red in there as well was really exciting. We spent 12 days in the north of Norway and Sweden and the lights turned up practically every night and sometimes lasted for hours – so much more than we expected. And to occupy ourselves during the hours of daylight we met up with our friends Di & Dave (who we met at the other end of the world in Antarctica) and did all sorts of exciting things: ... read more

On the morning of the wedding I was woke up with a kiss from Nikki, Nikki and I are extremely competitive, to the extent we even make wishing each other happy anniversary a competition, I knew that as soon as I opened my eyes she was going to say something along the lines of “Today’s our wedding day” so I had to beat her to it. After the kiss and before I opened my eyes I said “Happy wedding day” I heard Nikki laugh at which point I opened my eyes and whispered “I said it first” followed by Nikki saying quite loudly “No that’s cheating”. Ah what a great way to start the day lol. We had to meet at the reception at 9am to go in to Kiruna to register our wedding and sort ... read more

When I was a little girl every Christmas Eve my Mum would read me ‘The Night Before Christmas’. It was a lovely tale about Santa Claus - accompanied by brightly colored pictures depicting his wooden house in Lappland with a snowy roof and candles glowing at the window. Santa would be beavering away in his cozy cabin to make lots of presents for every child in the world - obviously with the assistance of his elves (we all know that Santa couldn’t manage this task on his own - well unless he bulldozed the log cabin and opened up a multi-line production factory in Luton). Anyway, back to the point I was making….which is that I’ve found where Santa lives and it’s the village of Jukkasjarvi in Northern Sweden - well it looks very like “The ... read more

We got up pretty early on the 24th and grabbed some breakfast. Since we were still pretty tired from the epic journey out, we arranged for a late check out and went back to nap! Once we had left the warm accomodations, we went to the "luggage hut" and put all our belongings into a locker, received the oh-so-fashionable snowsuits you see in the pictures below, and immediately headed into the icehotel. It was astounding. The photos don't entirely capture the experience, but hopefully they will give something of an impression of what it was like. In addition, at the top of the page are a number of video clips that were filmed as we hung out in the Absolut Icebar for 4 1/2 hours before we went to sleep on our Ice bed... It was ... read more

Ice Hotel The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi is a definitely Swedish experience. Located on the Torne River in Swedish Lapland, this is a great place to visit. So I did. We got up early and got on the bus. It wasn't such a long ride. On the way, we had to stop so the reindeer could cross the road. And then I saw some moose! Yay moose! When we arrived in town, we stopped at the old church, which was great. They had several wooden murals that they redid recently when they refurbished the old building. Then, we walked to the Ice Hotel. For those of you who are not familiar with this architectural marvel, let me just give a quick overview. Each year, these people harvest ice from the River and make it into snice ... read more