Category: Northern Dark 2024
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White-out snowmobile ride
No photos for Thursday, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. We had booked a “scenic snowmobile tour” for the morning, with a (for us) fairly early pick-up of 9:30. As we hadn’t ridden a snowmobile before, we had chosen the shorter, two and a half hour trip, rather than the four-or-five…
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Weather forecast grim for guided photo excursion
We woke on Wednesday and the forecast on my phone and laptop (Google and Apple have slightly different views of these things: it’s worthwhile to check both) concurred that while the morning would be clear, a snow storm was coming in for the afternoon. This boded ill for the aurora photography excursion that we had…
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A bit cloudier, weaker aurora (pink!)
Tuesday we had a lazy morning, nearly missing breakfast. Probably a result of sleeping well after getting very cold down by the lake the night before. Sat around catching up on the internet and relaxing. It was pretty overcast, so the views were more monochrome than on Monday, but we each went out for walks…
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Blue sky day in Abisko
The first full day at Abisko the weather was lovely. After a leisurely breakfast (and the writing of the previous post) we rugged ourselves up to go for a walk down to the lake (about 15 minutes if you were in a hurry, but we weren’t). First we walked up the hill behind the lodge…
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Getting to Abisko
Travel days have a similar character, but this one was more “fun” towards the end than the others have been. We started at a fairly leisurely pace: we had to check out of our room in Helsinki by 12:00, but our flight was not until 15:45, so we had plenty of time. We taxied to…
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Helsinki wrap
On Wednesday 11th we set off to see some iconic Helsinki architecture. We caught the tram to “rock church”, a Lutheran church that had not only been carved out of a big exposed rock, but which had its circular roof built like a wicker basket out of gleaming copper. Very interesting, for a small-ish church,…
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Helsinki starters
Just a quick one, because I spent the late afternoon writing the Trondheim post. The trip to Helsinki was uneventful, with one interesting wrinkle: having reached Helsinki airport I asked Google how to get to the hotel by public transport and it gave every indication of not even knowing of the existence of the airport…
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Trondheim
We did make it to our restaurant booking, just. Caught a taxi from the airport to make up a bit of time. A jolly good thing too, because it turns out that Fagn is fully worth it’s Michelin-adjacent bistro status. We had the five-course mystery course with wine (and beer, as it turned out) pairing…
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Bergen catch-up
We’ve had a lovely time in Bergen, for the most part. Having so much fun, in fact, that we haven’t stopped to blog the details for want of time. Right now though, I have plenty of time: shortly before boarding our flight, just after the plane arrived at the gate, SAS announced that there was…
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Travel day: quick location update
No photos (to speak of) today, but today was a travel day: GOT –> BGO. Got off to a decent start, when the hotel (Draken) let us have a 12:00 check-out. We were having a slow start both because it had been a pretty good night the night before (excellent, really) and because SAS had…