Lapland

I just got back from my holiday in Lapland in celebration of my friend Mel’s 30th birthday.  It was a skiing-light holiday.  We were all beginners and weren’t sure whether we’d enjoy it so we had skiing lessons in the morning, but other activities in the afternoon.

We arrived into Kittila airport on Sunday evening and headed over to our hotel in the Yllas resort, where Mel’s friend Fiona was waiting for us, having flown separately from Bristol.  We picked up our special thermal suits that we’d need for the week and we were looking good.

The next morning we had our first skiing lesson with Ville and we mastered the snowplough on the nursery slopes.  It was a feeble -6.  We’ve had that in London!  We can handle that.  Because the resort is only busy around Christmas with people visiting Father Christmas, the slopes are really empty and we constitute the entire ski class.

We had activities scheduled for every afternoon, apart from the Monday.  So we decided that Monday afternoon’s activity would be a nap.  I think I might be a bad influence on Mel and Fiona.

The next day was more skiing, and it was a bit colder and windy so not too many photos as it was too cold to de-glove.  In the afternoon we had a skimobile trip.

Before:

, 

After:

As you can see, the snowmobiling trip did not go exactly to plan.  I was on the back of Fiona’s mobile and Mel was on her own.  On the stretch home we went round a corner and slowed down to let the rest of the group catch up.  Except they didn’t.  Mel had managed to crash her snowmobile, but thankfully she was catapulted over the front before the snowmobile crashed into a tree.  There wasn’t a scratch on her but the same could not be said for the snowmobile, so unfortunately Mel ended the day 500 euros poorer, but we were just pleased that she was in one piece.

The next day we left the nursery slopes and progressed to some blue runs.  The ski instructor asked if we were practising between lessons and we confessed that we weren’t.  He nodded, as if that explained things.

That afternoon we went to visit the reindeers. A theme was developing, in that everywhere we went we were offered hot berry juice and cinnamon biscuits.  Om nom nom.  We got to feed the reindeer, and as you can see they eat lichen, not carrots.

and then have a little ride in a sleigh.

The people at the snowmobiling place felt a bit sorry for us so offered us a free night-time snowmobile trip to go looking for the Northern lights.  None of us was allowed anywhere near the driver’s seat though, so I was on the pillion and Mel and Fiona were dragged behind in a sled.  No northern lights, but a fun trip through the snowy forests and yet more hot berry juice and biscuits.

On Thursday morning, our ski instructor got us to do some exercises to improve our balance so we were skiing on one leg, skiing backwards etc.  Very entertaining for the other people around the nursery slopes.

In the afternoon, we went to a husky farm where we got to meet the dogs.

Then we had a ride in the sleigh.  Mel and I both had a go a mushing (although disappointingly we didn’t actually get to shout “Mush!” – I guess we could have done anyway, but I was worried that it would make the dogs accelerate from “tourist speed” to “full speed”).

It was absolutely fantastic.  The dogs are mental and can’t wait to be let out to run.  Afterwards, over yet more berry juice, the trainer told us all about husky racing and showed us a 2 week old puppy.  We weren’t allowed a cuddle it, as if the pup smelled too much like human then the mum might reject it, but it was so cute, all white like a little polar bear cub, that I literally had to sit on my hands to stop me from stroking it.  Sorry, no pictures either but it’s a bit of a tease to describe something really cute with no pics, so it looked a bit like this.  We all agreed that husky mushing was the most fun thing we’d done so far.

Back at the hotel, Fiona and I had got an early night, but Mel woke us up at about 11 to say that the Northern lights were out.  After unsuccessfully trekking into the middle of the forest to see them, we could now see them from our bedroom window.  It started with a general band of green, that then started to move about and change colour.

On Friday it was our last skiing lesson and as you can see, we had now mastered the kiddy slalom!

The good thing about the slopes being so quiet is that there was nobody around to watch us so we were not embarrassed at all to be doing stuff like this.  Also, when I fell off the ski lift or went up a slope that was too steep for me and had to come down on my bum, then there was nobody to witness my humiliation.  Friday was the best day in terms of visibility, so we took the gondola lift up to the top.

We had all booked massages for Friday afternoon, so we had a relaxing time being pummelled by an abrupt and burly Finnish man.  We had heard that the Northern lights were likely to be out again, so at about 10pm we went to a little hut slightly away from the lights of the the resort, started a fire and waited to see what we could see.  I was happy enough tending to my fire, but after 45 minutes we were getting a bit cold and also being harrassed by Zamboni drivers, we were about to give up, when we saw a strange green glow on the horizon.  After a few minutes of not being quite sure whether it was anything at all, it got brighter and started moving again.  It’s not really an easy thing to photograph, so you’ll just have to take my word for it though.

Saturday was a full day’s trip to the Ice Hotel in Sweden.  The weather in our resort had been relatively mild, only getting down as low as -18, but here it was -32.  Inside the hotel it was a balmy -8 and although it was fun to look round, I would not in a million years spend 3000 Krona to spend the night there.  The rooms are amazing though, all decorated differently.

We also got lunch in the Ice Hotel restaurant, which has the world’s least appetising artwork on the walls.

On Saturday evening, we saw the Northern lights from our bedrom  window again.  I think we were very lucky, as our ski instructor had told us that the lights happen “less frequently than we lead the tourists to believe”.  So although we didn’t get to see really bright spectacular ones, we could at least say we saw them.

Sunday was our day for going home, but we had time for a bit of skiing in the morning and a bit of swimming in the afternoon, before flying home in the kind of snow storm that we would never dream of travelling in at home.

Cumbrian Adventure

At Glastonbury this year, Mr Beet and I won a competition for a free stay in a National Trust cottage of our choice.  We thought it would be lovely to go to the Lake District to chill out the week before Christmas.  At least, it seemed like a lovely idea when we booked it in July.

Of course, the problem with staying in a remote cottage down a narrow and seldom-used country lane in December, is that if it snows you are screwed.  It snowed.

There was no snow when Mr Beet went up as an advance party on the Friday afternoon, so he got to the cottage at about 3pm no problem and settled in.  The plan was that I would come up on the train that evening after work, and he would pick me up from the station, which was the other side of the Lake District about 60 miles from the cottage.  But when I called to say that I was at Preston he looked out of the window and it had started to snow heavily.  He set off to pick me up and after about 10 miles and a couple of skids he decided that it would be too dangerous to try to carry on, or even to return to the cottage, so he pulled over at the next pub he came across and stayed there for the night.  I stayed in a hotel by the train station.

The next day, he reckoned that he could carry on from the pub to the hotel where I was staying, since that was all on main roads.  So by Saturday we were at least together, although not at the cottage.  Mr Beet was thoroughly fed up by this point, and worried that we wouldn’t be able to get back home for Christmas, so he just wanted to go home.  Trouble was that all his stuff was still at the cottage.  We stayed another night in the hotel, because he needed a rest from the stress of driving in the bad weather.  And it was a very nice hotel with yummy cooked breakfasts, so that was no hardship.

So on day 3, Sunday, we tried to get back to the cottage.  We got to within 2 miles of the cottage, then the car gave up at a hill on the snow-covered narrow road leading there, so we had to walk the last little bit.  I went through my stuff and the food that we had brought and pared it down to one backpack’s worth and we set off.  On the way we met some locals out for a walk and they pointed us in the right direction and we got chatting.  One said that the only problem with the snow was that he couldn’t get to the post office to get stamps for his Christmas cards.  Mr Beet had some stamps in his wallet, so he offered those.  The locals walked with us as far as the village, and then we walked the last mile to the cottage by ourselves.  It really was in the middle of nowhere.  We got there just as the light was beginning to fade and were looking forward to having a sit down and a nice cup of tea.

Except that Mr Beet couldn’t find the key to the cottage.  We’d had a whole conversation at the car about what we should and shouldn’t bring and we’d joked about the key to the cottage being the most important thing, so we knew he’d definitely had it when we set off.  After me making him check his various pockets for about 5 minutes and him insisting that he didn’t have it, we knew we had to retrace our steps and try to find the key in the snow and the quickly fading light.  Mr Beet reckoned that it must have fallen from his pocket when he took his wallet out to offer the stamps, so we at least had an idea where to look.  So we walked a mile back to the village, with me trying to comfort an extremely grumpy Mr Beet, and luckily enough spotted the key straight away in the place where we thought it might be.  Phew!  The walk back to the cottage was a lot more jolly, and we did then get it for a lovely cup of tea, a biscuit or several and a look round our beautiful cottage.

So our holiday proper started on the Sunday night and we had a completely lazy and wonderful time.  There was no TV or internet signal so Radio 4 was constantly on and we spent the time going for walks around the lake, drinking endless cups of tea and doing the jigsaws at the cottage.

So after a couple of days of this, we had really started to relax and enjoy our holiday.  Everything was lovely, except that it was so cold that some of the pipes had frozen so we couldn’t use any of the taps upstairs.

And although the living room with the wood burning stove was cosy, the rest of the house was freezing so bedtime meant two duvets, four blankets, a hot water bottle, bedsocks and jumpers over our pyjamas.

On the Tuesday, we walked back to the car to pick up more food and we noticed that they were gritting the road on the hill that we couldn’t get up.  So we returned a couple of hours later once the grit had had the chance to do its work, and we were able to get the car up the hill and all the way to the cottage.  So finally we had all our stuff and everything was where it was meant to be.

Then on Tuesday night we had just gone to bed and there was an earthquake.  A shitting earthquake! At least, we guessed that that’s what it was, but the cottage is pretty close to Sellafield, so other theories included an explosion at the power station.  Of course, if I’d had been somewhere civilised with broadband, I’d have been straight on the internet and (a) twitter would have reassured me that other people had felt it too and (b) google would have confirmed that it was an earthquake and nothing more sinister.  But of course, we had no internet, TV or even a signal for a local radio station, so it was back to listening to good old radio 4, where we didn’t really expect to hear a small local earthquake being reported, but when we’d heard nothing at all reported for about half an hour we were at least reassured that it probably wasn’t a major explosion / plane crash / impending apocalypse and we went back to bed.

That was enough excitement for one holiday, so we spent the next couple of days being similarly lazy and then to avoid any drama getting home for Christmas, we left a day earlier than planned to make sure we could get back ok and weren’t caught out by a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

Health and Safety gone mad

Blackheath Station.

No trains, no information on the screens, no announcements.  Finally the tannoy crackles into life – at last some information!

“Rollerskating and skateboarding are prohibited at this station.”

It’d be a pretty foolhardy skateboarder who would brave the sheet ice of the platform this week.

Christmas Shopping in Cologne

BeetMum and I popped over to Cologne for the weekend on the Eurostar (changing at Brussels – very easy) for a little look round the Christmas markets.

Now I’m not very good at planning holidays as Mr Beet tends to research the crap out of everything, so there’s not normally much left for me to do (or maybe Mr Beet has to research everything because I don’t).  Anyway, apart from booking our train tickets and hotel I had done very little research as to where the markets were or what to expect.  But more by luck that judgment, the main Dom (Cathedral) market was 2 minutes from our hotel, so on arrival we went and had a quick look round before bed.

The next morning, we had a look round Cologne Cathedral.  I visited Cologne on a school music tour in 1999 and our choir sang here, but I didn’t remember quite how enormous it was.

The sightseeing box duly ticked, we proceeded to a full day of marketing, starting off with another look round the Dom market by daylight.

Our lack of research proved no hindrance as there is a little train to take you round the different markets so you don’t get lost.

We thought the Dom market would be the biggest, but in fact they were all pretty big so there was lots to see.  We went to the Alter Markt, the Mediaeval Market (not very good, and the only one that charged for entry, but it was next to the Chocolate Museum and we visited the shop there for warmth, sustenance and a few presents) and the Markt der Engels.

The stalls are as you would imagine; lots of gluhwein, stodgy food – we dined on sausage in a bun and deep fried banana (the remnants of which BeetMum carried around with her for the rest of the day waiting for a pigeon that never appeared) – stollen, gingerbread, christmas decorations and arts-and-craft-type gifts.

I had brought a jumper to wear each day, but it was pretty cold

so I ended up wearing all of them at once.  To add to the Christmas atmosphere we had a little sprinkling of snow – just enough to dust the rooftops.