We arrived in the small town of Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden, by mid morning and to our surprise a snow blizzard was passing through the town leaving everything a few feet under the powdery white stuff.
We made our way to the Yellow Guesthouse but despite warning the owner we were due to arrive earlier than initially planned the place was locked up and nobody expected to be on reception until the afternoon. We had lunch at a local burger joint and killed time in the Tourism Office before making our way back to the guesthouse.
One thing I can suggest, if any of you ever make it to this part of the world, don't stay at this place! Warning - the owner is an arsehole and quite possibly one of the rudest people we've come across in our travels! Talk about absolutely no interest in us staying there at all.
The biggest problem we had in Kiruna was that, contrary to 11 months out of the year, there was actually nothing to do! The world famous Ice Hotel is located nearby and there are dozens of winter and summer activities in and around Kiruna. But, very much unfortunately for us, the month of May is neither winter or summer and all of the tourist companies shut down for a month. D'oh!
Even a visit to the Ice Hotel was not going to be worth it as the melted remains of the structure were covered in snow from the blizzard, and the museum mentioned on their website is in fact not open. It was pretty disheartening but these things happen when you're travelling around.
After realising this we cut down our planned two night stay to just one night and spent our one evening in Lappland watching TV (it was pretty cold outside as you'd expect) and enjoying a bottle of wine.
Hey, at least the snow was cool.
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