Day 7, Norway, Reine to Svolvaer

3:15am wake up call hoping for Aurora. It was cloudy but we had high hopes that the clouds would clear enough for us to see Aurora, so we ventured out to Hamnoy to try and photograph the Toppoy mountain. Unfortunately for us, the clouds never cleared and a stormy, moody sky with mountain and water ended up being out shot. At this point, it was almost 6 am and we were freezing (luckily I have my north face long down coat that's the equivalent to wearing a sleeping bag, so only my toes and fingers were numb!) so we got into the car and drove back to Reine, about ten minutes, to see if things would light up a bit for sunrise. We stood on the bridge in Reine for a couple of hours and saw a tiny bit of pink on the horizon, but nothing on the clouds for us! We have not had any good sunrises or sunsets thus far!

We had to check out of our cabin today, so we all decided we needed a quick nap first, then packed and then got on our way. We took our time heading up north and explored various spots along the way and also scouted a few locations for Aurora which we knew would be strong tonight. It took us about 4.5 hours to get north and when we arrived, our hotel was situated on the water with gorgeous mountains surrounding it. None of us knew what to expect up north and it is more beautiful than we could have ever imagined. Ever turn we had to stop and our jaws just dropped. One more beautiful scene after the next. It's hard to fully describe but if you can picture huge fjords, massive lakes and waterways, bridges, trees, and happy people, then that would be my description of Norway.

Our cabin was super cute and large with a downstairs of a kitchen and living room and upstairs two bedrooms, with an extremely steep staircase! We went to dinner in the main lodge and our waiter was great. He was chatty and said that he had to moved to Norway for the fish and that he loved fish and fishing and had a boat that was in Sweden with his girlfriend and that he could eat fish seven days a week. We had fish. Lol. There is literally no other option! I am so over fish right now. The first meal I want when I get home is a salad!

Toward the end of our meal, while watching the sunset as we were eating (it was perfectly clear skies, so a beautiful sunset but not good for photos since there were no clouds), Aaron went to check if the Aurora had started. Sure enough, it had! Yippee! So we paid for our dinner, ran out the door, grabbed our gear and started shooting. We drove around and photographed many spots up to over an hour away until 2am. It started to die down by then, but we had some good shots and were happy so we made the trek back to the hotel to sleep for a few hours!