Flemming and I hoped to leave Älvsbyn in the morning, but the weather decided otherwise. Cold front that came during the night, stayed. The forecast promised better flying conditions in the afternoon, and we had to wait. I played piano, and Flemming sang. We had fun!
In Lapland, we got used to the weather changing every hour. As long as we still had enough of vacation time left, we took it easy. Our destination was going to be Gargnäs – a small village, beautifully located in the middle of a lake! Since I discovered Gargnäs on a map, I wanted to visit it.
It would be a short flight, but the forecast kept postponing our chances. In the evening, the skies finally became clearer, and when the ceiling lifted, we were ready for take-off. Peter was there to wish us a nice flight:
We flew over the forests and hills:
As closer to Gargnäs we were coming, as more lakes were on our way:
Note those huge rocks on the ground – they were a size of a tree! Nobody would want to land in such a place in case of emergency…
I was getting darker; we expected to land in Gargnäs somewhere around 10 p.m. – before the sunset.
And when we reached Gargnäs, the sun finally came out of the clouds. It was rather irritating, because we were going to land on runway 35 – and the sun in July is going down in Lapland in the north, not in the west!
When we realised that, we thought it was funny. But it wasn’t that funny on landing. It was difficult to see the beginning of the runway against the sunlight, and we did a couple of go-arounds.
We had PPR via a text message, but otherwise couldn’t get in touch with the manager of the airfield.
A herd of sheep welcomed us to Gargnäs:
Flemming had made an agreement with the owners of the Trollforsen camping that a stuga (a small cottage in Swedish) would be left open for us. It was about 1.5 km walk through the forest.
We found our stuga, and had dinner we brought with us – our favourite Abisko bread with ham and cheese.
The nights were very light (and extremely short – sometimes it was difficult to sleep), and we went for a short walk around our place.
We very happy to reach Gargnäs. The weather was unpredictable, there wasn’t any mobile network coverage, but we knew we’d be fine.