So who wants to see some amazing vacation photos from our time in Finland? Everybody??? That’s what we were hoping for! For those of you who didn’t know, in early December 2015, we took off on an amazing trip to Finland! Nicole is a master trip planner and had us set up to hit Helsinki, Rovaniemi, and Saariselka in Finland and Tallinn in Estonia! If you follow us on instagram (@kevkberg & @nicolehberg), you’ve already seen some iphone images, but now it’s time for the good stuff from the big camera!

We started our trip in Helsinki. Thanks to some pretty epic jet lag, we were up at 3:00 am waiting for a decent hour when things would start to open up. (Thankfully, Netflix works in Finland because there is nothing to watch at 3:00 am!) As you go through these images, you’ll notice there isn’t a lot of sunshine in any of the photos. That’s because the sun didn’t make too many appearances, and, when it did it, quickly went away. On our first morning, we took a nice walk around Helsinki to enjoy all of their Christmas Decorations!

We were ready to check out the Christmas markets, but, since it was super early in the morning, only a few of the booths were starting to setup.

On our taxi ride into town, we saw this Church that had a bunch of little Christmas trees in front of it. We made sure to go check out the trees the next day and they were super cute! We even saw a class of kids decorating one of the trees!

While taking in the sights of Helsinki, we visited a church built into rock. The top of the church looked like a UFO coming out of the rock formation! It was beautiful on the inside!

We next headed to Rovaniemi where we took a nighttime snowmobile ride! We were hoping to see the Aurora Borealis, but a small snow storm prevented our first viewing of the northern lights. However, it was a lot of fun riding a snow mobile with snow falling!

We woke up the next morning and went to Santa Claus Village which was the coolest place ever! Greeting us upon arrival was a giant snowman and lots of beautiful Christmas trees! We really enjoyed our time here. We took a reindeer sleigh ride (check Nicole’s instagram…she nailed a reindeer selfie!), sent some post cards, and even met the big man himself! That’s right, we met Santa! He did note that Nicole and I both had been very good and should expect a lot of presents! We also enjoyed seeing the sign of cities around the world and their distance from Santa Clause Village…espcially since we had been in Tokyo earlier in the year!

We booked an Aurora Borealis tour for the next night.  This tour took us an hour outside of the small town of Rovaniemi where we would get an amazing view of the stars and the lights! We climbed a large hill/small mountain where we sat in several feet of snow and watched the Aurora for hours! It was an amazing experience! For so long, Nicole and I both have wanted to see the Aurora and, man, did we get a show! The lights started off slow, but after about an hour or so, when everyone else went inside the tents to have coffee and snacks, Nicole and I sat with our frozen camera and the lights began to act crazy!!! We couldn’t believe how bright they were and how rapidly they danced!!! (I instagrammed a photo of our camera and tripod at the end of the night. Both were completely covered in ice!)

We next headed to Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Saariselka to stay at their Igloo Village. We spent one night in an igloo and another in a little cabin. You’ve probably seen a picture of the Igloo Village on buzzfeed.com or one of several other websites that have said this place is a bucket list destination that you must visit. Well, thanks to Nicole, we went and it was AWESOME!!! Like this first pic of the two of us? No biggie. Just handing out in front of an igloo with the Aurora shining brightly behind us! (We’ve already printed this photo for our living room wall!)

This is the view of the Aurora Borealis from our beds in the igloo..

We stepped outside to take this picture while freezing our butts off for the sake of showing off our Mystic Seminars t-shirts! Mystic is an amazing conference for photographers that we have gone to the last two years and will continue to attend as it is such a great experience to hangout with amazing photographers who happen to be amazing people as well!

I usually freeze or sweat my butt off while taking star trail pictures, but this time it was nice to lay in bed and photograph a star trail from the comfort of our igloo! Now, for the outside star trail, I froze my butt off! It was about -22 when I photographed this while sitting in about five feet of snow. We definitley put our camera and tripod through an epic cold weather test!

We switched to our cabin the next morning and enjoyed the beautiful day light that lasted from about 11:30 to about 1:30pm before it went back to darkness!

As we waited for our bus to the airport, Nicole noticed this little guy sitting on the building having a snack!

It was really crazy when we flew out of Ivalo Airport. It was snowing pretty hard, the ground was covered in snow, the plane was covered in snow, and it was freezing cold…but not one canceled flight! Just a little de-icer on the wings and then we were off! Everybody at the airport had a blast stopping and taking photos on the way to board the plane!

On the day after our flight back to Helsinki from Saariselka, we took a bus trip to Porvoo. Porvoo is an older town and was a joy to walk around. There were cafes, candy stores, and lots of cute shops! We only wish it didn’t start down pouring on us that day so we could have enjoyed walking around more!

While we knew Finland was going to be amazing, Nicole couldn’t bear to be that close to Tallinn, Estonia, and NOT visit.  So Nicole was able to fit in two countries on this trip! We took a two hour ferry ride from Helsinki, Finland, to Tallinn, Estonia, where we spent the better part of two days. Tallinn was a beautiful city, and we had amazing weather while there! We got more sunshine the first day in Tallinn than we did the entire time we were in Finland!

Note the cannon balls in the wall…

That’s about all of our trip to Finland! We had an amazing trip and cannot wait to travel to Finland again! We could spend every Christmas in Finland and be extremely happy! To end this blog, we have a panorama of the Aurora and a little GoPro video we made while on our trip!  (Forgive the messy GoPro video!  It was our first time using it and we apparently hit the microphone a good bit.)