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After a super comfy night and a filling brekfast, Alex and I crossed Luleå towards the train station. The whole city is under an heavy blanket of snow, on the ground, and an heavier blanket of clouds, in the sky.

The meteo is really not promising… The irony being that our only night up North is the only day this week where the sky will be clouded. Dame Nature seem to be playing the harvester of sorrow, happily deprieving us of its majesty.

However, like all good story protagonists, we cunningly changed our plan, while seated in the train, three minutes before it left. We stayed in it though, but instead of spending only one night in Jukkasjärvi and then back two nights in Luleå, we will instead spent the one after Jukkasjärvi in Kiruna, the city nearby. The forecast seem favourable, so our hopes started to grow.

Our train got an hour delayed, but that’s alright, we had two hours to make our bus connection anyway. The five hours went by pretty fast. During that journey, we really started to feel far away. We are truly in Lapland now. Not a soul in sight, the few towns we crossed are completely under a meter of snow. Now that’s the adventure! We pushed the Northern final frontier of the Great European Train Tour far far up today!

Kiruna train station is quite off the center, so we had a bit of walk in the now-covered streets. Huge piles of snow and ice on the side of the roads, icicles dripping from the rooftops… Yeah, we’re here!

We took a bus for half an hour to reach the small village of Jukkasjärvi. There aren’t many inhabitants there, although it is quite famous for its Ice Hotel. As its name suggests, the Ice Hotel is an hotel entirely built with ice. We went there just to see it from outside, but as a pair of tramps, we are far from having the cashflow to play Frozen for the night.

However, our airbnb ruled! It was a small house annex, super comfy albeit without shower, located at the very end of the village.It was just the perfect base camp to go watch the Northern Lights. Naturally, we went to walk along the road, into the night, into the forest. We barely needed the headlight even. The sky was still completely closed, but it was a really good time. At some point, we left the road to follow a large straight snow path for a few hundred meters, and ended up standing near beached boats on a side of a lake. Yet, there was a road on the lake, with many traces of tires. We were probably standing over water, with a very thick layer of ice over it.

We went back to eat an enormous pile of pasta, and then back outside again a couple times during the evening, but no luck. A great evening nonetheless, and I am much more confident about tomorrow.