A Birthday Trip.

One where it’s just you and your girlfriends, untouched by roles, by expectations, by the quiet pressure to perform. One where, almost unexpectedly, something long forgotten returns. The child.

That particular kind of freedom. The slightly foolish, deeply honest, girlish one. The one that existed before it was slowly, almost violently, redirected into tight molds, controlled expressions, unnatural poses and waterproof mascara that refuses to give anything away. Back when our faces -still somewhere preserved in printed Kodak photos inside old boxes- were not in sync with the outside world, and yet were perfectly aligned with whatever lived inside us. No filtering, no correction. Just expression, unedited and unashamed.

That freedom is rare. And precious. And not easily found again. Sometimes it asks for effort. Sometimes for resistance. Because it tends to disappear somewhere inside propriety -a word that, if we are honest, describes the luckier versions of restraint. And yet, when it returns, you recognise it instantly.

That’s how we began.

Soft. Warm. Almost tender. With best friends who are like family and family who are best friends. Exactly how I wish everything could feel during the cold month of my birthday -and every month actually. I started with a quiet hope that maybe this time my birthday gift would be something extra. Something larger. The sky, perhaps.

And somehow… we were given exactly that.

The Northern lights are not a constant. They are not something you request. They require patience, endurance, a certain kind of surrender. A silent agreement with yourself that, no matter how prepared you are, they may choose not to appear. You travel north. Far north. Into temperatures that strip everything down to essentials. Into months where darkness stretches endlessly, where the night feels almost permanent. You move along frozen roads, far from light, far from certainty. The weather shifts without warning. The sky changes its mind. And somewhere within all of this, an invisible force -the Earth’s magnetic field, measured by something they call the KP index -decides whether anything will happen at all.

We knew all of this. We had read it, understood it, repeated it to ourselves. And quietly, we had already accepted it.

The days before were watching instagram reels, filled with snowstorms. Videos of people struggling to walk. White everywhere. The kind of white that erases outlines. The kind that leaves no room for anything else. A world so different from the one those of us from the South are used to. We had accepted defeat. We decided that we would still make it the perfect girls birthday trip. Snowstorm included.

I remember falling asleep on the plane. And then waking up. Abruptly. As if something called me to look. A golden light. Calm. Otherworldly. Almost outer space-like. Mountains. Endless peaks. Covered entirely in white. A landscape so still it almost felt suspended. A white veil stretching beyond what the eye could hold. Whatever was waiting for us down there, I remember thinking, we had already made the right decision.

We landed in Tromsø, collected our car and, somewhere between the airport and that first stretch of frozen road, the trip we had imagined for months suddenly became real.

The city slowly gave way to white. Roads narrowed, houses became fewer, mountains grew around us and the dark blue of the sea kept appearing between them. Little fishing villages emerged along the way, their red and ochre houses almost too perfectly placed against the snow. And that’s when my mind started wandering. How do people live here? What does a day feel like in this kind of winter darkness? Why do the windows have no curtains, no shutters? Where is everyone? Is this road real, or are we driving on something that might disappear beneath us? And then, among all those questions: “Oh… the sky is clear.” What a quiet surge of hope. The odds were in our favour.

Night had already fallen hours before. We settled into one of the hotels we had booked along the way (that actually deserved a post on its own but I will just post two photos of our room below and that is all I will ever need to say!) and, not long after, wrapped ourselves in every layer we owned and headed back out for our first “safari.”

“It’s funny,” I said to my cousin. Our last trip together had quite literally been a safari. And now, here we were again, searching for something elusive in the wild -only this time, we weren’t looking at the land. We were looking up.

And what a different kind of wilderness this was.

At first, we didn’t really know where to look, or even how. We knew only one thing: darkness was our ally. So we left the city lights behind and drove towards somewhere remote, watching the sky impatiently through the windows, as if staring hard enough might somehow make it happen.

And then, suddenly, a white line appeared. Something like a cloud, but with a distinct shape.

Could it be?

We knew reality could be a little more underwhelming than those super-exposed photographs, and that a phone camera was often the easiest way to detect a faint aurora before your eyes could properly see it.

So we lifted our phones and—bam.

Green hues appeared inside our “cloud.”

We started screaming, “The Aurora! The Aurora!” and suddenly… the sky lit up.

Literally on green fire.

It was one of the most extraordinary spectacles we had ever seen. And somehow, the phenomenon blessed us for the entire week, each night becoming better than the one before.

What a birthday gift!

What an almost extraterrestrial experience, watching those lights dance against the endless black of the Arctic night. We were in awe. Standing outside the car in temperatures reaching -30°C, sometimes taking our gloves off to capture the perfect shot, suddenly seemed a very small price to pay for a spectacle like this.

Our darkness-covered days, driving through the postcard-perfect Lofoten Islands—from Tromsø all the way to Sakrisøy—became a trip of joy, laughter, awe, pinch-me moments and true girl friendship.

We saw only three hours of daylight each day, surrounded by the most breathtaking snowy peaks and deep-blue frozen seascapes. We visited a reindeer farm, learned about the Sámi people and ate delicious fish soup. We boarded ferries without even realizing we had reached a port, drove a total of 1,000 kilometres -most of them on ice- and looked remarkably average in nearly every photograph because posing gracefully in that cold was simply not an option.

And every night, the sky gave us its best show. Our hearts were full with the purest kind of joy and love for life. Because perhaps the best drug of all is to immerse yourself completely in being alive. A road trip has one more gift to give its passengers: moments of reflection. As distances expanded, time softened. Silence became something almost tangible. And in the end, what stayed was not only what we saw. It was everything in between.

The adjustment. The quiet endurance. The unfamiliar becoming, slowly, almost gently, something we could inhabit. The laughter that comes without effort. The shared glances. The unspoken understanding. The kind of care we rarely allow ourselves.

Not excess. Not escape.

Presence.

Because we deserve that kind of presence.

A trip that will remain, quietly and undeniably, “the best birthday in the universe”.

So far. : )

Thank you to my girls Effie and Elina—for everything. <3