We have enjoyed a FANTASTICAL day today starting with a nice breakfast and then on a bus at 8:30am heading out to Santa’s Grotto. We had a 9am appointment to meet FC and we were second in the queue. What a fantastic experience for all of us – it was our first time actually meeting the big guy and we thoroughly enjoyed it, even if the younger Rust’s were a little intimidated.

Ŵe also baked gingerbread cookies with Mrs Claus, made some paper snowflakes, took a snowmobile train out to a tadional Finnish hut where we cooked sausages and marshmallows over the open fire right in the middle of the hut. Daddy managed to burn his left birdy finger on a melted marshmallow – for some reason he did not realise that it would be so hot and sticky 🙁

We also did lots of sledging, played football with an Elf before heading back to Levi on the bus.

We wandered into the local town for lunch and found a nice pizzeria and enjoyed a cheeky gluhwein along with a tasty super thin pizza. We found the alcohol store where we picked up a few bottles of Minttu for back home and then back to the hotel via a couple of gifts stores.

Then spent an hour or so in the vast swimming pools in the spa which included swimming outdoors (was-20 celcius so daddy’s hair, eye brows and beard actually froze while the boys were outside….),the long slide, several hot tubs and a cold (-8C) plunge pool – all the boys sampled it 🙂

We completed our day with dinner and more sledging – tomorrow wear going to have a relaxed start and head over to the town sledging park (since this seems to be the boys favourite pastime), have a late lunch in town, all befor a horse and sleigh ride out to hopefully see the northern lights 🙂
Finally, the day started out at -23C – cold does not begin to touch how utter it was- however we all had a great day – very much looking forward to trying to have a similarly good day tomorrow 🙂