Days 1-3: Home to Äkäslompolo via Helsinki

We had such an amazing time in Lapland last winter that we knew we wanted to return. It's definitely not a cheap destination, but despite our best attempts, we hadn't managed to see the northern lights last year, and so that seemed like a good justification to plan another trip

We wanted to replicate last year's travel plans, flying from Gatwick to Helsinki and travelling onwards from there to Äkäslompolo in the north via train. The only part of last year's holiday which we didn't want to repeat was the stress of nearly missing our flight out from Gatwick when I massively underestimated how many people would be on the roads on 27 December. Our flight on Tuesday was at 18.45 with airport parking booked from 16.00, so we decided to give ourselves what should have been a ridiculous amount of time for a journey Google said would take two hours, and leave home at 11.30.

Unfortunately in our excitement at setting off we blindly followed the initial instructions of the Sat-Nav, realising too late that it had opted to take us down the M1. We had wanted to go down the M40, which would necessitate less time on the M25 later on, so had a moment of indecision while we weighed up the inconvenience of backtracking to find the M40 against the risk of getting stuck in horrific jams around London. Ultimately the M1 made the decision for us; as soon as we drove onto it we found it was virtually a car park already! We came off at the next junction and about halfway to the M40, Tim came up with the cunning plan of setting the Sat-Nav to avoid motorways altogether. This turned out to be a really good idea and we had a much more scenic and much less frustrating trip south than last year. With the exception of heavy traffic in some of the outer London suburbs, we hardly got stuck in any jams and arrived at the airport parking at 4pm on the dot

Gatwick was nice and calm and we were flying with Norwegian, which is always a pleasant experience. The flight took around three hours, so the two hour time difference in Finland meant that it was about 23.45 when we landed in Helsinki. Everything had been going swimmingly well, but unfortunately there was a technical glitch with the baggage carousel (it mysteriously stopped halfway through unloading the bags from our flight, before starting up again nearly half an hour later), so we missed the airport buses I'd been hoping to get and ended up on the 00.40, which is the second last one of the day. Luckily at that time of night there was hardly any traffic, and by 01.15 we were arriving in central Helsinki.

A big difference to last year was that there was no snow in Helsinki, but this was actually a positive because last year it was very slippery on the city streets. We made our way to the hotel (which fortunately has a 24-hour reception) with the aim of getting as much sleep as possible, while waking up on time to make the most of the breakfast buffet.

It turned out breakfast was served until 09.30, so at 09.00 we were downstairs trying to get our money's worth. Everything in Finland is really expensive, especially with the Euro exchange rate being worse than last year, so we wanted to fill up. Luckily it was a good breakfast buffet with eggs and bacon, plus some pastries filled with rice. It sounds weird, but they were actually really nice

This was our third time in Helsinki so we already had a good idea of the main sights. When we left the hotel, we walked in the direction of the sea first of all, and soon came across the familiar view of Helsinki's Orthodox cathedral.

We strolled along the coast for a while...

...making the most of the limited daylight.

Helsinki seems like a very green city, with lots of parks and expanses of water. We walked through one of the parks, which we had remembered as being pretty from when we visited Helsinki in summer 2013.

The paths were a bit more difficult today though, completely covered by ice in places, so it was pretty slow going. Eventually we arrived at the Winter Garden, a large glasshouse on a slight slope above the city.

There were some lovely views back towards where we'd walked from.

Behind the Winter Garden is the Olympic Stadium, which hosted the Olympics in 1952. They seem to be doing some renovation works on it at the moment, so we skirted around it and started walking back through the park towards the main city, on the opposite side of the water this time.

This part of the lake was frozen and we spotted a man standing out on the ice (he seemed to have made a hole to fish through!).

The path was very slippery again, and so we copied what other people were doing and walked along the bike lane instead, which seemed to be better gritted. Fortunately there weren't many cyclists out and about!

We were pretty cold by this point, so we found a nice coffee shop where we were able to sit for a while and thaw out. €16.60 enabled us to get a cup of coffee and chocolate cake each. Finnish prices definitely take some getting used to, but in fairness once you had bought the first cup of coffee you were allowed to get subsequent refills for only €1 more each.

By the time we set foot outside again it was starting to look a bit twilighty already.

While there was still daylight, we wanted to see the beautiful Lutheran cathedral in the city centre.

There were some pretty Christmas decorations in the square too, so we decided we'd have to return once it was properly dark.

We stocked up on some provisions for the train and found ourselves in the lovely Esplanadi park just as the Christmas decorations there were starting to light up.

This display in the centre of the park is my favourite...

...especially the reindeer

Darkness had fallen properly now and there were Christmas lights everywhere.

We returned to the main square and found the cathedral beautifully illuminated.

We were freezing again by this point so walked back in the direction of the train station to find a Nepalese restaurant that we'd eaten at last year and hadn't seemed too expensive.

Happily it was still there and we were able to stretch out the meal a bit to make the most of the warmth. The food was filling and one nice thing about Finland is that you can always have free tap water with your meal, avoiding the expensive prices of drinks

After a final stroll around we returned to the hotel, where the receptionist had kindly let us leave our suitcases behind the desk all day, saving what I think would have been €6 each for a locker at the train station.

Our train to Kolari was due to depart at 20.52 and we were at the station in plenty of time. I was excited because we had a compartment on the upper deck of a double-decker carriage. We found it with no problem and settled in for the journey

The compartment was really very nice, with proper duvets and pillows, plenty of sockets to charge things and our own ensuite bathroom. We departed Helsinki on time and within the first hour of the journey, we could start to see a sprinkling of snow through the window

Tim may admittedly have drawn the short straw by getting the top bunk again, and unfortunately he got woken up fairly early in the morning by a loud snorer in the neighbouring compartment! By the time I had woken up and got dressed it was starting to get light outside and I had glimpses of the very snowy landscape outside through the window.

Tim had been sitting in the train's dining car, where he'd discovered that the train was running about half an hour behind schedule. That was fine by us, as we weren't able to check into our apartment until 16.00 and so were in no hurry to arrive. The train had free Wi-Fi so we were able to check our position on Google Maps, and by 10.48 - which was our scheduled arrival time - we were still 70km from Kolari.

We ultimately pulled into the station there just before midday, a full hour late. As we had got closer to Kolari, we had views of huge piles of logs by the side of the tracks, and we were passed by several trains which looked like they were transporting logs southwards.

As we got off the train in Kolari, we were pleased to see that there was just as much snow as we remembered from last year

Lots and lots of snow

There isn't a lot at Kolari and it's definitely not the sort of place where you'd want to be stuck for long. Luckily the buses which were meeting the train seemed to be aware that it was running late, and the bus which we were planning to catch to the little village of Äkäslompolo arrived a few minutes after we did. It's an expensive bus journey - over €12 each for a ride of about half an hour - but we are just glad there is a bus at all in such a remote neighbourhood! We had a pretty journey through the snow, and the bus driver dropped us not far from the main supermarket in the centre of the village.

Our plan had been to go to a nice restaurant that we'd eaten at several times last year and where they hadn't seemed to mind us taking a long time over a meal, but to our surprise we found that it appeared to be closed. We still had three hours to kill before we could get to the apartment and these aren't the sort of temperatures where you want to loiter outside for long, so we needed to find somewhere else. Luckily there was a pizza place on the opposite side of the main road, so we decided to give that a try.

The menu was... interesting! I ultimately had a chicken and pepperoni pizza, which was nice, but several of the other pizzas on offer included reindeer meat and two of them also featured bear meat That aside, it was a nice restaurant and the pizzas were enormous, so we were legitimately able to spend an hour or so working our way through them.

After lunch we did a bit of shopping at the supermarket and then decided to try our luck and see whether we could check into the apartment an hour early. It's a slightly complicated system which involves the owners texting you a code for a little black box which has the key for the apartment in it and last year we had some problems because they sent us the code for the box, but didn't tell us which number apartment we were in. This year it thankfully all worked smoothly and our luck was in, because when we arrived around 3pm we found the apartment was all ready and we were able to get inside straight away

It's a basic apartment, but warm and comfortable which are the most important points! We settled in for a while, catching up on the blog and sorting out all our cold weather gear, ready for a stroll in the snow later this evening