Finland

Finnish Lapland, to be exact.

I have wanted to stay in a glass igloo since I saw them on the cover of National Geographic over a decade ago. The thing is, there isn't a lot of fashion happening in the arctic circle and the likelihood of me being booked to do a runway show or photo shoot up there was pretty much non-existent. Now that I have hung up my heels, I really travel for pleasure and not work, which was previously impossible. However, I definitely spent the first few years of my "retirement" traveling to tropical places. After all, I am from Florida, and winter activities are not exactly my specialty.

Ian and I have at this point moved to the sunshine state and opened an ice cream shop (The Pink Pelican) with a new baby. Now that we are living in Florida again, tropical destinations don't hold as much excitement. So, when I started looking into romantic getaways for the two of us, I thought back on those glass igloos and knew that they would be the perfect winter wonderland to relax and unwind!

I had to find the right igloo, though. Shockingly, there is more than one

glass igloo village and some of them are outrageously tacky! Like, zebra print beds… Where the fuck are you going to find a zebra in any arctic climate?! When you're spending most of your time indoors, you want to make sure the indoors are not tacky. Thankfully, I stumbled across the Aurora Queen Resort on social media and holy shit, it was undoubtedly the most gorgeous igloo hotel that I found! And in addition to being stunningly

beautiful in the photos, it’s also eco-friendly. I booked the tickets and we were off on our (child-free) winter adventure!

If you've ever dreamed of fluffy, perfect piles of crisp white snow and skies full of endless stars dancing with the Northern lights, you absolutely must visit Finnish Lapland. The south of Finland has the thriving city of Helsinki, and

as you move north through Rovaniemi, you discover the north pole, where Santa Claus lives. If you keep going north, about another 4 hours by car, way, WAY up, past the edge of the arctic circle, into a tundra barely habitable by any one or any thing, you reach Ivalo. And, tucked into the pristine snow white mountains, is a stunning glass igloo resort, called The Aurora Queen. That, is where our travels take place.

I have experienced snow. I lived in New York for several years, but I was born in Florida, where it does not snow. Ever. To me, snow is magic. No matter how often I see it, snow makes me feel like a little kid, watching the most incredible event on earth! Now, I don’t love walking down slick city sidewalks, but just watching it fall from the sky, the way it envelopes the whole landscape, the way that everything becomes hushed all at once… it’s fucking magical. If you ever want to travel somewhere with guaranteed snow, Finnish Lapland is a spectacular bet! The trees are so caked with heavy snow that they can only be compared to something you would see in a snow globe. The snow is so frequent that everything is completely blanketed in deep, white snow. And that’s an important detail! In the city, snow becomes dirty and brown after a couple of days, but Finnish Lapland has some of the cleanest air in the world, along with a really spectacular revenants for nature, eco-friendly choices in all aspects of life, and the snow is really pure and beautiful, no matter where you travel.

Obviously, when there are several feet of snow on the ground, activities are limited, which is honestly phenomenal. So many times, we go on “vacations,” but spend the entire time rushing to fit in every tourist attraction. It’s exhausting, and we end up coming home from vacation, needing a vacation. The glass igloos made it possible to stay in bed and watch with wonder, the animals in the snowy forest, the sprinkle of snow falling down, the blazing northern lights in the sky above, all from the comfort of your warm luxurious bed. The rooms don’t even have TV’s to distract you from the pristine world outside. At the Aurora Queen, the floors and ceiling are both heated with geothermal power. This means that when it snows, the glass ceiling heats and the snow melts away, giving you a perfect view of the night sky. And that’s good, because in the winter, it is dark about 23 hours of the day.

I have to confess that we did not see the northern lights on our trip. They came around 4:00pm and Ian and I slept between 12:30pm-8:30pm daily. It wasn’t just the normal jet lag messing up our internal clocks. It was not having sun to tell your body when to rise and sleep. So, we were told that there would be northern lights, there were northern lights, but we fucking slept through them, which also tells you how badly we needed the rest! Still, it’s a bummer, but we’ll just have to see them another time!

Ian is a decent snowboarder. I have never been snowboarding, but I have done a little bit of skiing. Nearby, there was a ski resort and after the second day of staring at snow and each other, we thought that an activity might be a good idea! So, we headed off to the resort and signed up for a two hour snowboarding lesson. If you’ve never been snowboarding, it is really fucking hard. First of all, you really need to be able to touch your toes and, I’ll be honest, that was a STRUGGLE every time we got to the bottom of the hill, and then again at the top of the hill. Our instructor was maybe 4.5 feet tall and 100 pounds, but she dragged my ass out of the snow several times! Snowboarding did not come naturally to me, and after my 18th fall, I decided to go drink glog in the clubhouse while Ian wrapped up. He actually made it to the next level and was snowboarding on his own! I was doing a great job at drinking what is essentially hot mulled wine.

That night, we went to a reindeer farm run by the Sámi (people indigenous to lapland, which covers the northernmost area of Finland, Norway, Sweden) of the area. At this farm, people could take a sleigh ride through the snowy forest, pulled by reindeer. However, reindeer are small and my ass is large, and the reindeer didn’t do anything wrong, so I decided to skip the sleigh ride and just feed them some lychen. The guys running the place were confused because we paid the price for the sleigh ride, but there wasn’t an option to just be a weirdo and hang out with reindeer, so that’s on them.

The following day, we decided to check out a spa near the Holiday Inn Resort at Saaraselka ski resort. It had indoor pools, sauna (Finlandians fucking love a sauna), steam room,

spa, etc. I anticipated that there would be a hot tub in the pool area. They advertised having 7 pools of varying heat. So, we paid $100 for a day pass and holy disappointment! There was no hot tub. Apparently a hot tub to them was around 80 degrees. Keep in mind that it was zero degrees outside and I was really wanting that hot soak for my post snowboarding body. I was actually pretty furious that we wasted $100 on a shitty lukewarm pool with tons of kids running around.

We rented snowshoes from the Aurora Queen when we returned. I wanted to take some dramatic fashion photos for the blog and this would be the perfect way to get into the snowy scenery for that perfect backdrop. You know, caught in the snowy forest in a designer gown vibes! Ian and I had never used snow shoes but they distribute your weight so you can walk on deep snow without sinking down to the ground. Or so we thought!

Keep in mind that where the snow was not shoveled, the shallowest area were still about 4 feet deep. I stepped onto a ledge of snow and immediately sunk down, freezing my legs! I shuffled out as fast as a could and got back in my warm cabin. Since Ian was not wearing a designer gown, but appropriate snow attire, I asked him to walk around and see if he had different results. He did not!

After warming up, I decided that I was going to get the damn picture, so a shuffled past all of the cabins to a wooded area and tried stepping on the snow again. I sunk. But I was going to get the shot, so I waded through the snow a few feet, with snow literally emcompassing my entire lower half. Fuck, that was freezing!!! It was actually so cold that it hurt! I don’t get paid enough for this frozen hell. I shuffled as fast as my tennis racket shoes would let me, back to my cozy, geothermal heated igloo. I checked my camera and none of the pictures were good. I looked that I was coming out of the snow like the hun in Mulan (You can tell that I have a child from my references. Please don’t judge me.). It was not cute. So, I threw some thermal pants on under my gown, strapped on real snow boots, and settled for some pics at the edge of the deep snow. I don’t think I’ve ever given up on getting “the shot,” but this was some evolutionary, “get your ass inside” shit that was out of my control. I got some decent photos, though. And, more importantly, I spent lots of time not taking pictures, which I consider a win!

On our last day, Ian and I decided to go snowmobiling! Neither of us had ever been, but it looked so fun! The Aurora Queen Resort has their own snowmobiles and guides. We left at what would be considered dawn, around 11:30am. Snowmobiles are evidently really hard to steer. It is much more difficult to control one that you would imagine. We each had our own snowmobile. I was behind the guide and Ian was behind me. The resort provided clothing, which was brilliant because nothing I had could have withstood the bitter cold of speeding through the wild. My hands were so cold that they hurt. Even with the handle warmers on the snowmobile, my fingers froze. My eyes were watering and lashes freezing as we slid over the snowy landscape.

We went deep into the woods and it was endlessly beautiful, untamed, untouched. Something that’s really important out in areas with meters of snow is that you stay on the "path." For snowmobiling, that meant following the tracks of the person in front of you. Those tracks are snow that has been packed down and if you step on it, it feels like the ground… but it isn’t. And if you step off of it, you drop into feet of soft snow that envelops you.

Naturally, our guide made a sharp turn and I couldn’t maneuver my snowmobile to turn like his, so it veered a little off of the path, causing the entire thing to roll over with me on it! Thankfully, the snow was soft, like that scene in frozen where Anna and Christoph fall off of the mountain... The snowmobile was less soft, but the guide was able to pull it up very quickly. When I went to stand up, I realized that anywhere I tried to place my feet for balance would just keep fall away under the weight. The guide and Ian had to pull me out of the pillowy snow and back onto the hard snow trail. It was scary. If I had been alone, my fabulous corpse would still be out there. However, I climbed back on the snowmobile and rode the rest of the way back to the resort, perhaps more cautiously, but unscathed. It was definitely an adrenaline rush! But I think my snowmobiling career ended that day!

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