Our next two days in Sweden were pretty low key. We spent most of our time curled up in the hotel lounge by the fire with books, hot chocolate and more beer. It was pure bliss if I’m honest. Sure I am up for seeing as much as possible while you’re away but sometimes it is just as good and rewarding to sit down, look out of the window and just while the hours away.
Sunrise is late this far north. This was about 9:30am
The hotel lounge was also super cosy which made it very difficult to pull yourself away. We did however decide it was a good idea to take the short walk up to the hotel’s Aurora viewing platform. It was a struggle to get there to say the least. The “walk” took us up a very steep path to the top of the hill in deep snow.
That’s a lake out there!
It was also snowing and very windy which didn’t make it an amazing experience but it was very refreshing! Once we got back we treated ourselves to chips and beer!
Stuart took an additional walk later on in the afternoon (while I spent more time drinking beer) and got some much nicer pictures when it wasn’t so snowy!
Our evening began again with an earlier dinner but tonight we were headed to the Aurora Sky Station. The Sky Station is based on top of Mount Nuolja and is home to the oldest chair lift in Sweden. As part of the visit you get provided with another snow suit which I was very thankful as it was SO cold.
The chair lift itself takes about 30 minutes to get from the bottom to 900m up, the temperature at the top was -17C with windchill. The chair lift itself is 2km long!
It was a very cloudy night so were weren’t holding out much hope of seeing the lights. They did appear for a brief moment on our way up but it wasn’t anything spectacular like the night before.
The Sky Station itself isn’t very well lit on the outside (understandably otherwise it would ruin any pictures taken of the lights but it did make it quite difficult to see what was ice and what wasn’t. After scrambling up a snowy hill we set up for the evening. As it got colder we decided to head inside, have a hot chocolate and a hot dog before making our way back down.
Again, the trip down takes about 30 minutes but is much scarier as it is very steep and in the dark at points it looks like a vertical drop. Still it gave us a good view of the Abisko National Park.
We finally made it back to the hotel just after midnight so we took ourselves off to bed after a relaxing but long day!
Like it? Share using an image below!
