Northern Lights over Kiruna

Tonight we are in London, leaving on Saturday morning.  From Heathrow, we came into Paddington Station.  When I was reading the Paddington Bear books to my children, I never really thought that I would ever go to Paddington Station!

                           

However, back to yesterday…

We caught the midday train from Abisko to Kiruna, a city a bit south of Abisko.  We had to stop overnight there as today we were catching a plane to London via Stockholm.  We had really enjoyed our time at Abisko, but were disappointed that it had been cloudy every night which made it impossible to view the Aurora Borealis, except for Friday night, when the auroras were at quite a low level of activity.  When we were leaving Abisko it was bright and sunny with clear skies.  It made everything look lovely, but made Anna a bit unhappy as she hadn’t seen many auroras because of the overcast conditions.

When we arrived in Kiruna it was a bit confusing as to how we got into the city centre – however we discovered that there was a free bus.  It is so nice to now be in a country where I can read the signs!  Although many people in Sweden speak excellent English; menus, instructions, directions, etc are usually only in Swedish.

When we got off the bus I realised that I should have put on more clothes and my grippers.  I had a very miserable walk to the building where the tourist information centre was located.  After having something to eat – we hadn’t had lunch – and putting on more clothes, I was ready to walk to our hotel.  It was actually quite pleasant, although in spite of only being about 4pm, it was almost dark.

Our hotel was interesting, it was run in conjunction with some sort of school.  Although our room was called a ‘twin room’, it was only a twin room as the desk had been removed and replaced by a folding bed.  Anna won this bed – she also wins top bunks!  The room, although small, was actually ok – it was clean and we had our own toilet and hand basin.  The showers were in the basement and were rather primitive (think school gym style), so we decided to give them a miss  We also had to make our own beds.

However we decided that the sky was clear so we dressed warmly and ventured outside.  We certainly weren’t disappointed  Here are two photos of what we saw!

We stopped out for ages watching the aurora form and re-form and dance across the sky - it was quite magical and a great finale to our Swedish trip.   

And then this morning the sun was shining.  This was the view from our window.

Hope the weather in London is kind to us...