It is Sunday morning and we are presently sat waiting for the coach to take us back to Kittila airport for the journey home.

We had a lovely Christmas party last night and got a final meeting with Santa where he delivered the first gift of Christmas to both boys – a lovely Lapland reindeer.

We didn’t manage to go swimming this morning as per ur loose plan as we enjoyed a nice lie in instead 🙂

The boys (specifically Olly) have rally missed little Hugo sop ar super excited to see him again – literally the hours cannot disappear quick enough…

It has been a wonderful few days despite the child rage and tears (mainly from the parents)

We got up bright and breezy this morning for a 9am trip out to a Husky and Reindeer farm for trips out on each.

Our group went out on the Reindeer and sleigh trip first and wow – we actually got in a small sleigh that sat two or three, were connected up (so to speak) to ‘our Reindeer’ and then off we went. Mummy and Olly went first in the group and their reindeer sprinted off with them before slowing to a nice gentle trot around the course – possibly two kilometres or so. Daddy and Elly wer last to go with Joscar – he trotted around quite leisurely at the back but when we got to the end, Joscar decided that he wasn’t ready to come back so sprinted off to the right with the sleigh in tow 😀 hopefully daddy got decent video footage to shar 🙂

The husky run was next and wow it w sure cool – all four of us behind 10 dogs (2 of which wer fighting with each other mid way around :-)) and we went out for maybe 3 or 4 km through the trees and then again out over the frozen lake. The lady who stood out back was telling us that the dogs and her fath were participating in a 1,000km race in March so all these day tours were good for their raining as they would be racing those 1,000km over 7 days!!!!

A little sledging, pancakes for lunch and then a little swim this afternoon befor getting ready for the Christmas party this evening 🙂

Home tomorrow 🙂

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 🙂