Snow, Santa and Cynicism in Luosto, Finland

After months of travel around South America, we were back in Europe but we felt like we had one final trip in us before our big 2019 Travel Year was over. We had a few criteria in mind: we wanted to end our big travel adventure with a bang; we wanted to soak up the Christmas spirit; we wanted to make it interesting and exciting for the kids; we wanted it to be somewhere new, but not too far away and not too expensive.

With all this in mind, we started our research and one place checked all our boxes and more…Lapland, Finland! Home of Santa, and a snowy wonderland right on the Arctic Circle. It was quite a shock to the system (in fact, if you google, “what is the opposite of South America?”, the first few answers will all say “Finland”*), but the perfect destination to end our travels with a bang and begin the (hopefully relaxing!) Christmas period with family.

*This is not true

Our boys are rapidly approaching their cynical tween years, so we knew this would be our last chance to fully enjoy a child’s excitement of going to the North Pole to see Santa Claus (okay, not all the way to the North Pole, but the Arctic Circle is close enough, no?). At the same time, even now, we wanted to balance the Santa stuff with keeping their skeptical minds entertained by doing more adrenaline-filled snow activities. Fortunately, Finland is the country that just keeps on checking our boxes! We found that cool activities abound and chose to begin our stay with a few nights about 90 minutes north of Santa in Luosto.

Luosto is a tiny town with a small ski hill that is set on the edge of the National Park. It’s easy to see why Santa chose to live near here. We stayed in a log cabin, which of course came with its own sauna.

In retrospect, we might have been too caught up on trying to make this an all-encompassing amazing once-in-a-lifetime adventure because the boys were having a blast just playing in the snow.

Nevertheless, we had activities to do! There’s no better fun than organized fun…said no one…ever. Oh well, cross country skiing here we come! We quickly got suited up, rented our equipment and headed for the trails. However, shortly after we put our skis on it dawned on us that none of us had ever actually been cross country skiing before.

Fortunately, a Finnish lady came by as we struggled with our equipment. She turned out to be an ex-professional and gave us all free lessons. Ha! Not likely, she breezed past us with a chuckle. So we just watched her disappear around a corner and decided we’d just try to copy what she was doing. Unbelievably, that worked!

Until, of course, we came to a hill. After a few comically bad attempts, during which we mastered skiing downhill backwards, we made it to the top of the hill. After that, we just skied up and down that small hill for a while then went back and the boys played in the snow. Later on in our stay in Luosto we would see school children cross country skiing to and from school. Let’s just say they made it look easier than we did and leave it at that.

Long before they got bored of playing by themselves in the snow we dragged them off for some more organized fun in the form of sledding. We rented some sleds and went to the sledding hill.

The boys had fun, but the hill was a little small. So they did what any child would do and kept pushing their limits, walking further and further up the nearly empty ski slope to sled back down it. By the end of the day, they were practically downhill skiing on sleds.

We let them do that until, inevitably, someone told us we can’t do that for safety reasons. So we went home and…the boys played in the snow…again!

The next day, we dragged the boys away from playing in the snow to visit the Lampivaara Amethyst mine located in the middle of the stunning national park on top of Lampivaara fell. In our travels, we have done our fair share of tours and this one was, perhaps surprisingly, one of our favorites. We have to admit that the location was at least half of the appeal. Unspoiled, snow-covered beauty for miles around.

We were instructed to be at the designated parking spot at the designated time, then, a huge snow machine rolled up, picked up those of us taking the tour, and off we climbed through a pristine, white wilderness before finally arriving at the mine.

Once we arrived at the mine, we listened to a quick talk about the mine and how they operate (by hand, instead of by machine to minimize disruption to the local environment), and got to see some of the more impressive stones they had mined.

As part of the tour we were able to mine for our own Amethyst and keep whatever we could find, up to a certain size.

We all had fun digging in the rocks, but the best rocks seemed to be just littered around the surface.

We suspect they were planted there. Clearly the children are not the only cynics in this family! Nevertheless, we spent our time digging in hopes of uncovering (literally) a gem.

The value and uses of Amethyst were unclear to us. We think the value might have been exaggerated a bit as we know there’s a huge mine in Brazil. As for uses, a quick Google search reveals its healing powers for physical ailments as well as “Chakra rebalancing”**. However, if the Finnish were aware of this they certainly didn’t play it up. In fact, they never even mentioned it. Good old cynical Finns. Maybe our cynical family belongs in Finland?

** This is true

With our stay in the tranquil Luosto over, we headed to Rovaniemi and the home of Santa Land, but not before a quick stop off along the way to feed some reindeer. We didn’t book anything so we didn’t get a tour, but a very nice lady showed us around and talked a little about the reindeer.

We then bought some reindeer food and fed it to the animals.

There were some halfhearted comments about which reindeer would be chosen to go with Santa this year. It was a nice gesture, but cynicism was clearly winning the day. Maybe a trip to see the real thing would turn that around!?