Keeping Tabs: Our trip to the IceHotel..Day 1!

Three nights, four days to ourselves. No kids. This is big. We haven't been on a trip together since Florida 2008 after Jayden died. What will we do? Are we sure we can leave the kids that long? Santorini, Greece sounds nice. Orr remember that blog you came across about the northern lights? I think that was in…oh yeah Abisko, Sweden (one of the best places to see the northern lights because they have such clear skies and little light pollution, both of which are vital to seeing the lights). Ah, that would be awesome to see. Unfortunately, we've waited too late in the season and not many people are still booking northern light excursions in the north because the midnight sun is coming (they have 50-70 solid days of sunlight in the summer...no.dark.at.all.) and the window to see the lights is almost up (end of September to end of March). Oh but wait…what's this about an Icehotel?! Made completely of ice and snow...and you get to sleep in it?! Get out. Where is this again? Oh, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden also known as…IN THE ARTIC CIRCLE. Dear lord, I've seen enough snow this year...buttt this sounds like an adventure. An adventure you can only do without kids (not saying kids can't go and have fun in the snow, because we all know Gavin would have loved it…but having to dress them up and undress. Not to mention the constant complaining of I'm cold, I'm cold). Plus it's away from light pollution and in the aurora belt, so we could possibly see the lights. THIS. This is it! They have so many activities so even if we didn't see the northern lights…it'd be worth it.

Jukkasjärvi, Sweden it was.

This is what was going through my mind while trying to plan our excursion.

Day 1 Monday, April 6th, 2015: We dropped the kids off at a church family members house (whom we appreciate, love, and thank so much!!). Have I mentioned how blessed we are with our church FAMILY? This is what I'll miss most about Italy. Yes, we have blood family in the states. But they don't get us like our family we've made here. They share something with us that not a lot of our family does and that's a close relationship with God. They don't sugar coat anything to make you feel like you're a good person. They deeply care for us and us for them. Getting a little off topic...we then headed to Venice airport for our 11 hour journey to Jukkasjärvi.

We had two layovers. One in Copenhagen, Denmark..

and Stockholm, Sweden..

then finally arriving in Kiruna, Sweden where we took a shuttle (which I might add was amazing inside. It had lights in the roof to sort of symbolize the aurora borealis! I didn't want to be that American who takes pictures of everything…but that later changed) to the Icehotel. You could also arrange for a dog sled to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Icehotel and then back to the airport when departing but because we were arriving so late and leaving super early and it's already cold with the sun out…you can imagine it's colder with the sun down. Plus there’s no shelter while riding on the sled, AND it took 90 minutes...we decided to pass. Going here we learned that currency was way different. At least in euro, it's sort of similar (you can almost guesstimate stuff, like $20 equals around 25-27€). But here...oh my word. Let me grab a receipt. Okay, for two pair of wool socks, a normal beanie for Chance, and an Eskimo hat for me, it costed 764 Swedish krone (SEK)!!! When you hear that price and don’t use a similar conversion, your heart kind of skips a beat and your mind immediately goes to "these socks better give me super powers and this hat better be made of gold", lol! BUT after converting it, while still a lot for those 4 items and granted they were bought from the Icehotel gift shop, it was around $90. Much better! Anyways, we get to the Icehotel (it's a resort type place that has the actual Icehotel plus warm cabins in case you don't want to be a Popsicle and a restaurant) and get our luggage squared away in the dressing room because anything we took out with us would freeze. The dressing room is for the people staying in the Icehotel. It has showers, bathrooms, changing stalls, a sauna, and a living room type area to hang out just in case you get too cold. It was nearly midnight, but we still wanted to walk around and check out what we could. So we suited up (we had bought some cool snow suits before we came figuring it wouldn’t be our only time needing them) as it was -3 Celsius (around 26 Fahrenheit) outside. Detached from the Icehotel was a huge igloo place, also known as the Icebar. This was our first siting of what the inside would possibly look like in our cold room we were staying in, so inside we went. Obviously this is where you can have drinks but the cool part is, the cups are made of ice! The "chairs & tables" we're also ice with reindeer skin on top.

Front of the IceHotel

Inside the IceBar

The outside of the IceBar

Come to find out how they made this igloo is they took a huge balloon (I'm assuming a hot air balloon) and sit it in that spot, then sprayed water over it until a nice thick layer of ice had formed then they deflated the balloon and wa-la! This was the first year they had tried this design. We later learned that there was another "igloo" attached as a concert room but it had collapsed before we got there due to it being the end of the season. When I say end of the season, I mean we went there from Monday-Thursday and they shut the entire resort down that following Sunday because everything was beginning to melt. And when I say melt, yes that means they let the Icehotel melt every year and rebuild a new one every year. They bring in artist from all around the world every year to design it (if you think you could do it go to their website Icehotel.com and submit a form!). This year they were celebrating their 25th year! After leaving the Icebar, we walked around the back of the Icehotel and not having seen this place in the daylight, therefore not knowing what was in the dark (remember no light pollution…so VERY dark), I told Chance I'd rather live to see my kids again (you know what I'm talking about…how on movies people go in dark dark places you know they shouldn't because something bad is going to happen...well I'm not that stupid and can tell when I shouldn't go somewhere I ain't suppose to), so we turned around. We then decided we were super tired and ready to go to bed. We go get our sleeping bag (you get the option of a single sleeping bag or a double) and a snow mitt (I wanted to take my iPod out with us to take pictures so I had to put it in this so it wouldn't freeze). We chose a double sleeping bag because I'm thinking body heat will help keep us warm. Yeah. Never again. Think about it. When you go to get out, you can't just slide it off because someone else is sitting on the other side. So you have to wiggle and whatnot to get out, plus you can't pull it up over your head because again someone is next to you and might not want it over their head, so I had to burrow down in it. Back to the story. There's five types of rooms you can stay in: art suites, northern lights suites (we were thinking they'd have some big hole in the roof in case the northern lights were to appear and you could see them while laying on your block of ice but no, it's a room with lights set up to glow across the ceiling symbolizing the auroras...it was still beautiful though), snow rooms, ice rooms, and deluxe suites which have a separate room apart from the Icehotel with your own sauna and bathroom. We had booked the northern lights suite. We get in our room, look around and immediately think…"what have we gotten ourselves into?" Then about 2 minutes later Chance slid and fell! LOL! The bed thankfully had some sort of thin mattress so we weren't completely uncomfortable. Oh, and of course because everything is built out of snow and ice there were no doors to the rooms, just a curtain. It's always a chilly -5 Celsius (23 Fahrenheit) inside the Icehotel, so it wasn't UNBEARABLE for us. However it was still extremely cold. So we crawl in our sleeping bag, zip it up, draw the string creating a hole only for our heads (yeah imagine that in a double sleeping bag…not much room to move) and then tie knots in the string so it doesn't come undone during the night (you're given all these instructions before they send you out). Chance decides he's going to sleep like he usually does at home, on his side with one arm sticking out of the covers. I told him he's going to wake up and his arm would be black and frost bitten. His arm slept inside the sleeping bag. Although, they tell you not to sleep with your head under the "covers" because it'll create condensation or something another and usually I cannot stand my head to be covered but this time, I had to keep it covered. I can't sleep if my nose and ears are cold. If you're wondering what we wore or you're supposed to wear, they tell you all you need is thermals and the sleeping bag. I had on a fleece sweater, fleece pants, a hoodie with my hood up, gloves, and one pair of socks. I'm pretty sure Chance had on sleeping pants, socks, a long sleeve thermal plus his snow jacket...only thermals, ha. Now the worst part of staying in the Icehotel. Trying to fall asleep. When you're that cold, for me, it's super hard to fall asleep. But with the fake auroras dancing on our ceiling, it helped relax me and I finally passed out around 2am. But don't think it was a solid sleep, because I kept waking up to my face being cold even under the sleeping bag.