The main reason for coming to Kakslautanen was to see the Northern Lights. This year is meant to be a good year for Auroral activity and northern Finland is an ideal location. Unfortunately it also depends on the weather on the day which we can’t control.

We had organised a reindeer safari to see the northern lights. This entailed getting on reindeer sleighs at about 9 pm and heading out to the middle of nowhere. The hotel provided us with special winter gear and we even got some for Thomas. Unfortunately it was very cloudy and we couldn’t see a thing. We headed back to our room and all the kids went off to sleep about 10.30.

At about 11 pm, while Bron and I were just lying in bed looking up at the stars we noticed the sky change color. The clouds had passed and there was a greenish blue hue over the horizon. We wondered if it was just lights from a township in the horizon or the aurora. Soon the lights moved and looked like they were swirling. They definitely were the northern lights.

We tried to get the kids out of bed, but they were comatose. Ben eventually crawled out, but would remember nothing of the experience the next day. Matthew on the other hand was dreaming of Harry Potter and would not waken.

Over the next few of hours we saw the lights come and go across the horizon. There was a point at about 1 am when it formed a band across the night sky and we even saw it change in color to red. It is incredibly hard to describe what it looked like, but it was spectacular and nothing like anythingI have ever seen before.

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