At last, the day that we travel to the Arctic - Lapland in Finland has arrived.
After a number of worries about the timing of flights, weight of luggage and inter-lining it through to Kittila, everything worked out fine. The woman on the check-in desk kindly inter-lined our luggage all the way through and didn’t weigh my hand luggage which was way over the 8kgs with all the camera equipment! Finnair was a great airline (we slummed it in economy this time) and with my cheeky check-in I booked us with a space in between and nobody else wanted it so we had extra space and a seat for Gulliver!
Helsinki airport was not as impressive as I thought it would be as it is being refurbed at the moment but we were only there for about an hour. On the next short flight I sat next to a fascinating German guy who lives in Dubai and works for Porche. He goes around Europe each winter teaching people to drive Porches on the ice. He also likes photography and has the same camera body and lenses as me and some great Aurora shots. It was nice to be able to chat to someone interesting - we also talked Brexit and what he thought of Angela Merkell!!
This is our plane - a A321 waiting to take us to Lapland!
The next bit of the journey at Kittila was also very easy, our luggage came out after 5 minutes and the bus was waiting immediately outside, the man spoke English and we didn’t trip over on the very short walk to the hotel!! We even made it in time for a meal. Lovely food but rather on the pricey side (I had smoked reindeer starter but went veggie and had an excellent pea risotto for main).
It is not possible get a real impression of what it is like where we are staying, save to say there is snow, lots of it. It was snowing and there are massive 6 foot piles pushed to the side of the roads by the sweeper lorries. Can’t wait until light tomorrow morning to see where we are!
