Reindeer hut during a blizzard

The blizzard started last night and it was still wild this morning, with horizontal snow blowing about and poor visibility.  We ate breakfast and were checked out ready to leave the hotel by 9am. Just getting our suitcases into the minibus across the car park was a challenge!

We stopped a few times along the way to shoot the swirling snow of the blizzard against the little huts. It was a slow drive to our next destination on Senja island, a short distance as the crow flies from where we were, but actually a long trip on the single road across the islands to get there. There are long bridges to get from island to island. It was a whiteout with swirling snow for the entire journey and the coloured houses/huts are so pretty against the white landscape but on the narrow road you cannot easily find places to stop. We stopped to photograph this pretty reindeer hut in the swirling snow, it was not easy conditions for photography. I took my shots and got back into the car, but some others spent ages outside taking photos so you just have to wait until everyone is finished.

The group of people are really nice, usually in a group like this there are one or two people you don’t gel with but that is not the case here. Two kind people in the group gave me some foot warmers today, I knew about the hand warmers but did not realise you could also get them for your feet, and they made such a difference. Today as we were mainly in the car other than jumping out for short periods of photography, I managed to stay warm.


We finally arrived in Senja at our hotel in Mefjordbrygge at about 4.30pm (Mefjord Brygge Hotel). By now the snow had stopped and it was beautifully clear. We checked in, the hotel is very comfortable with simple functional rooms. We think we may go out aurora hunting after supper, so I decided to quickly post my blip now before supper. The forecast fro tomorrow is sunny but very cold - if it's sunny that means an early start to photograph the sunrise.