Whenever we stay in Venejärvi, regardless of how good our intentions are to get up early in the morning, we never do. Perhaps it's down to the peace and quiet of the forest or maybe it’s down to having the last meal of the day close to midnight. Once again though, we turned the alarm off and went straight back to sleep for another hour or so. Eventually we managed to get ourselves out of bed, dressed and walked down to the main house for breakfast. Th...

We only have 4 days left until we need to leave Lapland behind and start our long journey back to New Zealand. Before heading south though, we needed to head north again and collect all our stuff from the cottage in Venejärvi. When we left New Zealand we packed for the Arctic as well as the tropical & cold climates of Latin America. We didn't carry everything for the entire year either though, some stuff was left in Lapland, some stuff was posted back mi...

We had set the alarm for 9am and it was still pretty dark when it began to ring. It was hard to get up and out of bed, but we'd agreed yesterday with Katja and Petri that we would go snowboarding in Ylläs. After a standard breakfast of coffee, cake and porridge, the four of us plus Grandma and Nena, the dog, squeezed into Petri’s Audi Quattro for the drive to Äkäslompolo. The car handled exceptionally well on the snowy roads and even when a ...

It's a bit of blur what happened to yesterday. First of all, we slept for ages even though we didn’t go to bed particularly late. Perhaps it’s because the windows have blackout curtains (for the 24 hour summer daylight) and the bedroom is practically soundproof. We managed to get out for a walk down to supermarket and buy some dinner and that seemed to be about it. Today, however, we tried to make amends by setting the alarm for 8:30am, but all we m...

Christmas Day and we didn't get up until the sun was beginning to rise which in Lapland, at this time of year, is pretty late in the morning. Looking out towards the south there was a nice orange glow on the horizon. We ran from the cabin to the house for coffee and cakes, the breakfast before breakfast. Katja was making rice porridge this morning, and making it with tons of butter. It always tastes good but with an extra quarter pack of butter in it, it was ta...