We weren't in too much of a rush to get out of the extremely comfy bed in the morning and were lucky to catch breakfast before it closed. Breakfast was served in the atmospheric Loiste Restaurant on the 10th floor; it was enormous and had the most awesome selection of food. There was proper coffee for starters, juices, cereals, breads, pastries, fruit, a cold selection with herring, meats and cheeses plus a hot selection with eggs, bacon, porridge and sausage. We...

Finland does good trains!! The bed was one of the most comfortable that we had slept in all year, the private toilet worked like a dream and there was even a hot shower to boot. It was almost a shame that we had to get off. We had slept soundly the entire night and were woken by the alarm before having to get ready quickly. The train had made up time through the night and was arriving on schedule at 9am in Helsinki's main train station. We did another shuttle ru...

The alarm was set reasonably early but as usual, when we are here in Venejärvi, it's hard to get out of bed. After putting the alarm on snooze a couple of times, we finally dragged ourselves out of bed. We needed to be up early too, this wasn’t just a run of the mill day when time wasn’t so important. We had to get from the depths of the Lappish forest, way up inside the Arctic Circle, to Helsinki. This journey was the first leg of a very long s...

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...