Steph and I hopped the train to the airport where we were able to get in the lounge after waiting in line for a bit. The flight was mostly uninteresting, but we did see some aurora from the plane. It was hard to see out the window, and we didn’t have window seats. The woman in the window seat was nice enough to take a picture with my camera.

We got to the hotel, and it had an uneventful Friday. We went to the sauna in the marina, and that was really nice. The sauna has a huge window that looks out across the fjord at one of the mountains. I took a dip in the fjord, as did Steph. It was amazingly cold, but bearable with a pop back into the sauna.

Saturday we took the morning going dog sledding, which was amazing. The dogs were friendly and hilarious. There was a French couple who were guiding for the winter who showed us how to drive the sled. They let us drive the rear sled where the dogs followed the sled in front. It was still amazing to get to control the sled. The dogs loved rolling in the snow whenever we stopped.

That evening we took a bus to see the northern lights. It was cloudy in Norway so we had to drive through Finland and then cross a frozen river on foot into Sweden to get a good viewing spot. When we arrived we got a brief glimpse of strong activity that calmed down after about 30 minutes. Then we sat around a campfire and had some stew before heading back.

Sunday we went to the Polar Museum. It was mostly about hunting, and very rough living. They had lots of sexist views of women portrayed there, without disclaimers. They also had a full life sized diorama of baby seal clubbing, but that one had the disclaimer that they don’t do it anymore. It was a really morbid place.

Sunday evening we went to the Reindeer ranch kept by a group of Sami people. The Sami are the indigenous people of the far north of Scandinavia. The reindeer were cute, but some were pushy, and used their antlers to push you if you didn’t give them food quick enough.

We mainly stayed in for Monday and Tuesday, as it was still cloudy and we’d done everything we came to do. Wednesday we had a very early morning flight back.