I’ll start with a quick picture of the place where we stayed for three nights. It had more beds than we needed, a nice kitchen, huge living room, and a sauna with a nice warm area between the showers and the back door (so you could run from the sauna to the outside to roll around in the snow. Not even kidding). 
When traveling to any Northern countries, one must expect to be bundled up a lot. That's exactly how we felt for a week in Finland--bundled up. Probably not the easiest style of traveling, but that's what kept us warm, although not always comfortable. Picture below is of Mark and Alex ready for the next big adventure!
And the next adventure was truly epic. It was a must. It was something we all looked forward to. It was THE most expensive tour we had ever booked in all our travels, so expectations were pretty high.
What is it you might wonder?? Oh, the title says it all--DOG SLEDDING!
The company that we booked with provided extra warm layers to put OVER your winter coat and snow pants already. We were really bundled up again.
Then we had a mini presentation about all the dogs, about how they are bred, trained, fed, and all that. And finally, we got to meet our dogs. Robert was my driver for the first half.
There you go--that's how covered you had to be to not freeze.
Alex had to be the one driving Mark's sled.
And off we went! One after another! Alex and Mark were at the very front and we were right behind. It was exilirating to say the least! The job of the driver was to regulate the speed of the dogs by breaking with the help of the pedal in the back of the sled. And if needed, jump off and run behind the sled to help the dogs pull the sled up the hill. The job of the sled passenger was to survive the snow thrown in the face and dodge any poop that flies from the dogs pooping while running. Just kidding about the dodging it part--but the rest is true!
For the second part of the journey, we switched drivers (it's a trick in its own as we had to stand on the sled pedals at the same time). I did a good job driving too! And even had to jump off and run up the hill! A couple of times I was getting nervous because we were going so fast, but most of the time, we did ok. The main job was to maintain the distance between our dogs and Alex's sled.
The passenger view.
And after a 10 km loop we came back to our starting point. These dogs know the route and are trained to run this route every day.
In fact, they are very happy to be doing this job! It's like a reward for them to go run.
Beautiful dogs. Mark loved them!
Alex liked them-hahaha:)
And I just took a picture for memory's sake. No one is better than our Pepper-hahaha.
Wait, not done! Robert and the dogs!
We were led to a wooden hall, given a nice hot drink and a cookie (all included in the highest tour price ever) and told a few more things about the dogs. It all was very interesting. And it's also cool how so many Finnish people speak English really well, by the way.
That day we went to a restaurant for lunch. The menu wherever we went was never really diverse. Always A LOT of deer meet. Deer soup, deer burgers, meatballs, etc.
Yeah...deer gyro or something too.
It's interesting because all over Helsinki we saw posters and signs for a campaign to encourage people to eat less meat and more plant based. It's clear that deer meat is one of the most popular kinds of meats around here.
So after lunch, we headed to a sledding hill that someone gave us instructions for. It was really close to our house. Here came the time to use those borrowed sleds from the Rovaniemi train station!
We didn't sled late into the night, but since it gets dark so early, you can see clearly the ski resort lit up in the background.
Now we are talking--a halo!
I mean, it gets better-hahaha.
Then Alex was in the mood for a photoshoot worthy to be published in a magazine:)
And Mark over here--having the best time going down that empty hill over and over again!
And that is how our intense day ended!
To be continued...
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