Kirkenes, Day 3

We flew from Oslo to Kirkenes.

The airport experience was a bit different. At security,  a machine like the scanner to enter a subway let us through after looking at our boarding passes. No human ever looked at our ID. At the gate, another subway-like scanner reviewed our boarding pass before letting us on the jetway. But at security,  humans looked at  and handled our luggage very personally. R's half-gallon bag of oversized liquids did NOT pass, and he lost his over 3 oz bottle of shampoo. I tried not to think "I told you so!" loudly, but I'm bad at hiding such things.

Kirkenes is a tiny airport.  A van picked us up. It took us to the Snow Hotel. We had about 6 hours to hang out before our evening's plans (no checking in,  no nap). T and I put on more layers before walking through the snow hotel. Ice sculptures! Ice beds! It was beautiful,  but chilly.

We watched the dogs (they have dog sleds) and eventually went snow shoeing along the side of the fjord. The sky was gorgeous. I thought it looked like a painted sky done in watercolors.

Ok, remember that we are jet lagged and exhausted. And our evening plan has not started.

Eventually the hours passed and we got the van to our husky adventure.  We went dog sledging. T and I took turns driving.  Mostly driving entailed braking. The dogs just followed the sled in front. Being the passenger was less fun than driving.  The sled was not comfortable. Every bounce had no padding and hit the tailbone directly. Ugh.

The clouds covered any potential northern lights.

After the sledding, we were swaying on our feet. They tucked us into a fire-lit hut. They fed us a delicious meal. No lights, lots of smoke. My jacket and scarf smelled of smoke for days afterward. After dinner they finally showed us to our rooms. I lost the rock-paper-scissors, so our room had no private bathroom. There were two beds, one a bit larger than a twin. The bed was ok. My extra long USB cable (on the advice from T) even allowed my phone to murmur audio books to me. The bathroom part was awkward, though. We lost some sleep to get up early in time to both get showers before whoever we are sharing it with took it over.  I miss sleep. Between the jet lag,  the strange building sounds and my persistent sinus headache,  I got a measly 4 hours of sleep.

Ugh. I'm tired.