Days 1 & 2: Home to Saariselkä

It's January again, and that means it's time for our annual trip to Lapland Our journey got off to a relatively civilised start on Saturday morning, as we didn't have to leave home to drive down to Heathrow until 05.30. Fortunately, the weather in the UK had warmed up a bit; it had been rather cold and icy the previous weekend, to the extent that I was worried there was a risk we might end up missing out on our flights to Lapland as a result of snow-induced travel chaos at home! As it was, we had a straightforward journey, getting to the airport some time around 8am, in plenty of time for our 10.20 flight to Helsinki.

Inspired by my summer trip to Lapland in July, we'd booked our flight to Helsinki in business class and so, once we'd checked our baggage in and passed through security, we were able to go to the lounge. Finnair doesn't have its own lounge at Heathrow, so we were entitled to use the Qantas lounge instead. It was rather posh and there were not many other people there when we arrived, meaning we had the breakfast buffet almost to ourselves.

There was a selection of hot food and pastries, as well as a good coffee machine. We saved some money on the breakfast we would otherwise have bought at Wetherspoons!

Our flight was more or less on time and we were soon on our way, in the comfy Finnair business class seats.

The flight to Helsinki is around three hours. Soon after take-off, we were served a drink and snack (this was blueberry juice, which Finnair serve on all flights).

After that came lunch. It was only some time around 11am at this point, although that made it 1pm in Helsinki, so I decided it was acceptable to have a glass of wine. The meal was... interesting. I ate the chicken and left the mashed potato and brussel sprouts, as well as the beetroot starter!

Pudding was great though! When the air hostess handed me a pastry that looked slightly green, I was initially a bit suspicious, but it turned out to be pistachio-flavoured and actually really nice and sweet

Around this point in the flight, Tim realised that the privacy barrier between our two seats...

...could be removed so we could actually see each other

All the drinks on Finnair come in these very delicate glasses. They were fine for blueberry juice and wine, though Tim's beer looked a little bit silly in them!

I was just thinking that I could spend a lot longer on this flight, when we landed in a rather snowy-looking Helsinki.

It turned out that I was going to get my wish and we'd be spending at least another hour on the plane! When it arrived, the wings had to be de-iced. It was a bit hard to follow the announcements about what was happening, but it sounded like while the plane was stationery having the wings de-iced, some other part of it froze. And that meant that it was then stuck and couldn't continue taxiing to the gate. There were some extremely irate passengers who were missing their onward connections while we were all stuck on the plane, waiting for a vehicle to come and tow it to the gate instead. Eventually it did turn up and we made it to where we were supposed to be, but I suspect some people must have missed their flights as a result of the delay.

Luckily, our next flight wasn't until 20.20 so we still had plenty of time. We negotiated passport control, which did involve having our photos taken and being fingerprinted for the new EES system, and then we made our way to the Finnair lounge.

This was also pretty empty and peaceful; we were able to relax with our Kindles and some wine

The food offering was rather Nordic. I ended up with meatballs and rye bread...

...plus dessert made from more blueberries.

Our flight to Ivalo was delayed, but only by 30 minutes; it seemed like almost all flights were about half an hour late yesterday evening, presumably because of the need for de-icing. It was a tiny little plane with propellers and only steps at the back.

It wasn't even half full. We had seats next to each other in row 3 but when we arrived the flight attendant asked us to come and sit on opposite sides of row 1 instead and take responsibility for the doors in an emergency.

Luckily, there weren't any emergencies and around two hours later, we finally landed in Ivalo. It was only minus 2, so not particularly cold by Lapland standards.

Our baggage arrived quickly and the airport bus was sitting waiting outside the terminal. It's really good that these buses run to meet every Finnair flight and wait for them, even when they're delayed. The journey to Saariselkä took another 30 minutes, through increasingly heavy snow. Just before midnight, we were finally dropped off at our usual bus stop on the edge of town and walked the final ten minutes or so to our apartment.

We're staying in the same place as last year, which is cosy and has really good Wi-Fi.

The main downside is that you have to pay EUR 15 extra each for bedding, which is then left in a pile on the bed for you to make yourself when you arrive.

By the time we'd arrived, unpacked and sorted out the beds it must have been around 1am. That meant we didn't make a very early start to the day on Sunday, but when we did make it outside it was a lovely day; sunny and not too cold

And there was definitely plenty of snow this year.

It looked like previous apartment guests had even built a (now slightly wonky!) snowman.

We set off to walk around Saariselkä.

The rows of snowmobiles were out in their usual parking place.

When I'd been here in the summer, this spot had looked rather bare without the snow!

We looped around the village in a circle...

...then turned off once we reached a roundabout to follow a path into the woods.

As we did, we caught sight of a sunrise/sunset in the distance. It was around midday by this point.

The colours were really spectacular

We walked towards the sunset...

...before turning off onto a smaller road to the right. This led us past the local fire station.

When we'd been here last year, the weather had been quite warm; there had been a thaw, melting the snow which had then refrozen. This particular path was one which had been really icy as a result. Today it was fine, though; lots of fresh snow everywhere

You can see if you compare the photos of the same walk last year to today that there is definitely more snow this year. Here is Tim on the walk last year. You can see that the trees look quite green.

Here's Tim on the same walk today; the trees are a lot whiter!

The reason we like walking on this path is that it leads past a little enclosure of reindeer.

There were three of them in there today.

At least two of them were very tame and wanted to come and say hello

This one was particularly friendly!

This one was a little bit more timid and kept his distance.

It was fun to see them and watching how happy they were in the snow definitely showed me why they'd been finding last summer's Lapland heatwave uncomfortable!

Once we'd finished admiring the reindeer, we walked a bit further through the forest.

Some trees were definitely feeling the weight of the snow.

There were some beautiful colours in the sky from the setting sun.

It wasn't a circular route so at some point we had to turn around and head back towards Saariselkä.

On the way back we stopped to look at this tree; it was a huge conifer whose lower branches were so completely weighed down with snow that they formed a little tent.