Northern Lights Tour Day 06
Day 06, Feb 02, 2025, Rovaniemi to NL Village
Leaving Rovaniemi, Viktor drives the bus further north. At 11:00 AM, the sun is barely above the horizon. It won’t go very high in the sky today. The scenery driving along the roads today through the snow covered trees is beautiful. But it is cold, very cold! Brrrrrr!
We stop at an old church to please our cameras. They shiver with us but they function which is a bit surprising!
We arrive at a dogsled camp around 2 PM and gear up (again) in snowmobile suits. It has warmed up to only minus 25C! It’s a heat wave! We are given a briefing as to how to drive a dogsled (and how to ride in one!). Each couple is assigned to a dog team. First, Elee drives and I ride. Elee falls off immediately! Not a good start! But the Guides get her back up and she gets the hang of it quickly. I refrain from even chuckling as I know my time is coming and who knows how well I’ll do! Half way through, we switch and I drive back. This next set of photos was taken by Mikael, our Guide!
Driving a dogsled team is quite the exhilarating experience! There is no steering controls on a dogsled. The dogs want to run and they want to run where ever they wish! Luckily for us, they decide to follow the other sled teams, for the most part! There is a rubber pad between the rails that you can step on to slow the dogs down. There is also a hard brake bar that you can step on to finally stop them! The first time I lift a leg to put my foot on the brake pad, I fear I will suffer the same fate as Elee! But I manage to hold on and slow the team down. On uphill runs, it is sometimes necessary to push off with a foot to give the dogs to impetus they need to run.
Once the dogs return us to camp, my fingers and especially my thumbs, are numb to the bone! We all huddle inside the Guides hut around a fire where I manage to painfully warm them up! Then it is off to our lodge, Northern Lights Village. Tonight we eat Moose for dinner and sleep in a glass roof cabin.
The cabin is fun for the most part. It is very warm inside and it turns out that even the floors are heated! The bed is positioned directly under the glass roof. There is a digital fireplace at the foot of the bed for ambiance. We fall asleep looking up at a partly cloudy sky, some stars and tall pine trees! In the middle of the night the sky has cleared and I get some fun photos. It is very comfortable to sit on the heated floor with the camera on a tripod! But alas, the Northern Lights do not come out. A shooting star does show in one photo though!
Around the World in 80 Trips (Or Less) 
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