Just a little north of Rovaniemi there is a place called Santa Claus Village. It has lots of souvenir shops, cafes and a number of different Santa Claus's that you can visit and talk to. This is the place where children's letters to Santa are sent (at least if you are not from the US). We spent a while here walking around looking at the place, the people and giving Nina an opportunity to buy some of those souvenirs. Interestingly the place had a number of Russian tourists and hence many signs in Russian.

The village claimed, with many signs, to be right on the Arctic Circle giving it's latitude as 66° 33" 07' but we discovered from wikipedia that the correct latitude for the arctic circle is 66° 33" 44' (or 66.5622° in decimal format) so it misses by a little. According to ( the US nationalatlas.org ) 1 second of latitude (00° 00" 01') is 0.02 miles so those 37' represent 0.74 miles or just over a kilometer.

Traveling North from Rovaniemi we found a nice little peninsula jutting into a lake or canal as a camping spot. The spot had a bit of breeze to keep the insects down a bit, and easy access to fresh water so that we could do a load of washing.

We are now definitely in the territory of no darkness and while we did not take detailed notice of the setting of the sun we did note that we were able to take photos outside at midnight (see the last image in this post).

The continual light makes getting to sleep a little difficult, and tonight it was compounded by us regularly looking up the progress scores in the world cup final.