Well we did go to the arctic towards the end of the northern lights season and were hoping for some but not expecting to see them.
The first night was cloudy/snowy and we didn’t see anything.
The second night we were in the middle of dinner when the waitress ran over to us and told us that there were northern lights outside and we rushed out without all our layers on. We didn’t stay too long but understood what we were looking for – weak green wisps across the sky. We went out onto the frozen river later (wrapped up all warm) as it was the darkest place around and saw a few more weak northern lights. We were really pleased with this.
The third night was phenomenal! This was my hubby’s 40th birthday and the reason we were in the Icehotel. We must have spent a good couple of hours or more in total watching the lights. During an early dinner we heard about the lights (but were told they were weak again) so stayed eating dinner. We then saw more on the way out from dinner and these were stronger – and green (the most common colour). They were moving across the sky really quickly. They were also flashing on and off fast too (locals said they hadn’t seen this before). Hubby saw a brief flash of purple (the second most common colour apparently). It dropped from -12 degrees centigrade to -17 degrees centigrade between 9.00 and 10.30pm so we popped into the icebar again and again to warm up – it was only -5 in there! I wear glasses and found that entering the ‘warm’ icebar made my glasses steam up but as it was below freezing the mist on my glasses then froze leaving me unable to see. Oh well :) We had a really fantastic night watching the lights. The rest of the people on the river with us were either British or German – the Swedes had obviously seen it all before. We were thrilled and stayed out late before sitting in front of a fire to warm through – this was the night we stayed in an ice room and we wanted to warm up first as we were cold right through. What a great day :)
The fourth night was very similar to the second night but we felt so privileged to see them for 3 nights in a row. We were more blase about them as we had such a great show on the third night. Oh well ;)
