Meanwhile at Home: Beautiful Winter Images from Scandinavia

I am trying to be on denial. And I would be doing great if there was no Instagram.

Shorts, T-shirt and sandals are my daily uniform here in New Zealand, coupled with regularly applied layers of factor thirty or fifty. The bright blue pair of runners is put to use when we head to Rotorua’s Redwoods for bike rides or quick runs on the local forest trails. This is the kind of summer Norway only rarely sees.

In dawn when the rays of sun haven’t quite reached our front porch yet, I wrap myself in a snug sweater and pull on the one pair of jeans I have here with me. Only then the thoughts of winter seep in. The cold mornings back home in Norway, when the flames from the previous night’s fire are all but ash and the warmth and coziness long gone.

Before traveling to New Zealand I feared I would feel disheartened to skip the winter season. Missing the cold, crisp, sunny days on the ski slopes or tracks followed by waffles and hot chocolate in one of the local mountain lodges felt too much to miss. But now, I can only smile in the sun and try to forget that we are past the halfway mark of our stay here, and the winter is getting closer, again.

I am in the international jury for Travellink’s wintery Instagram competition without which I might have merrily forgotten the existence of winter altogether. But amidst my attempts of denial, it has been kind of lovely to get glimpses of Scandinavian winter on Instagram, from afar.

The competition is almost over now, but if you are in the Nordics or have any older images from there, you can still participate. The images with most votes will be awarded, but the main price, a trip to Palma for two, will go for the photo our jury will choose. For more information see these links: Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

In the early hours of this Thursday morning I ended up shuffling through the competition images from the respective countries and here are some of the amazing entries. Winter really is beautiful. From a distance. Says someone who’s heading to the beach today…

Wintery Norway brought no surprises really, the Norwegians seem to be the most active bunch of the “northerners” and with the dramatic nature we have back home, no wonder why.

Images: anbjoere, anet005, kriss1991, liisa_lee, mrbrakky, marianne_baera, kariskarprud, faugom

The Swedes have been most active in participating in the competition and were the biggest surprise to me. They had some of the most creative images, tricks I wouldn’t mind trying myself, next year and winter…

Images: flooberg, jockesyk, elinmelaas, rwallberg, anitao_, mysterymags, solveigs_make, mabrander

Finland will always be home sweet home for me. I love the rolling hills and at times almost flat landscape broken by thousands of lakes.

Images: dreameurotrip, keamar, jennaasi, kirsikatriina, micfrom, bridgesballoons, anna28h, minerrwa

I had no expectations of what the winter in Denmark would look like. Quite urban, it looks like. Probably the reason the Danes come en masse to Norway for their winter skiing every year.

Images: aimsdawnblake, betinarosiak, larswedde, meretemartin, josephine_christensen, livefotoanne, markojefta, bskovgaardl

If you’d prefer to see the sunshine from southern hemisphere, head over to my Instagram gallery. This week I have also taken over Finland’s most popular travel site’s, Rantapallo’s Instagram stream. They are pretty new in IG so take a look and follow!

But for now, we are off to the west coast for some surf and spectacular sunsets, I hope. If the Internet gods are good to us, you could catch them too on Facebook and Instagram. 🙂

Have you participated in Instagram Travel Thursday yet? If not, it’s not too late!

I’m part of the team co-hosting the Instagram Travel Thursday, an initiative started with Skimbaco Lifestyle online magazine to connect travel and Instagram enthusiasts across borders and I would love if you joined us! Read the guidelines on Skimbaco’s site and you too can now host this link-up in your own blog. You can get the code to add to your blog here. Once you are ready with your own post, please add it to the Linky in the bottom of the page and check out some of the other participating bloggers! In Instagram you can find me at @todestinationunknown.