Travelling Diaries
2018 Swedish Lapland / Day 3 - Travel to Sweden
Previous and next: Day 2 - London / Day 4 - Luleå
4th February 2018
The Tourettes have reformed
The trip to Swedish Lapland and the subsequent tour was organised by a big company we had travelled with before. Now we were back with them it meant that we were finally joining up with a new set of fellow travellers to form the group we affectionately call the Tourettes. But, I may hear you ask, what makes us tick?
Before we could find out, there was the trivial matter of getting to Lapland.
Karen and I headed off from the hotel in Kensington and made our way to Gatwick via the hugely expensive Gatwick Express.
Once at the airport we met up with our tour manager and some of the other Tourettes. After check-in we waited at the gate for our plane to Stockholm.
We were flying with a Norwegian company that is getting a lot of relatively good press recently, mostly because they don't treat you like cattle and force you to sit apart if you don't pay them for a specific seat.
The journey to Stockholm was uneventful. We had a little time to wait in the airport and we thought about having a drink, before we saw the prices! instead we had an expensive coffee and, after a short wait, we got on our flight to Luleå.
Back in 2015 when we did our trip to Norway, the thermometer had fallen to -15ºC at one point but was generally in the low minus figures. This we could cope with.
Here in Sweden, without the benefit of the Gulf Stream, the temperature can drop a lot lower.
When we left Stockholm this evening it had been a cool -4.5ºC so it was a bit of a shock to find it was -21ºC in Luleå.
It was dark when we arrived, so there was not much to see once we had checked in to our hotel. However, we did have a meal booked in another hotel that evening which meant a bit of a walk to stretch our legs and get a sense of the chilly evening.
This level of cold is different than what we had experienced before. Last time warm hats and gloves and woolly jumpers was all we needed. Therefore I thought that the short trip to the other hotel for the meal didn't justify fully togging up and just wore jeans, jumpers and a warm coat. However, you could feel the raw bitterness through the fabric of your clothes and I could feel the hairs on my legs starting to rise as if in sympathy with the cost of drink in this country. I was glad it was only a short walk.
Karen said to me afterwards, "I told you to put more clothes on." But to be honest it was so cold that I couldn't even get into a heated argument with her.
On the way back from the meal to the hotel I noticed that the streets were empty. Probably because it was too chilly to be hanging about.
[Luleå at night]
It brought back memories of a trip I did to Calgary in Canada back in the early noughties. It was about this time of year and it was about the same temperature when I was there. I remember seeing a homeless man who lived rough and thinking, how could he survive? However, he survived by sleeping under vents from hotels that threw out warm air from their heating systems. Still, it can't have been easy.
In contrast, on that same trip I also saw an Australian tourist going round in shorts. I kid you not. All I can say is he must have had snowballs.
Anyway, tonight we were all tired after our travels, so the Tourettes split up for the evening and went to bed, in preparation for our adventures the next day.
Before we retired I said to Karen, "We should be more like snowmen, as they never argue?" She said, "Why do they not argue?" I said, "It's because the last thing they want is a meltdown."
And on that note...
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