Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Locked-out in the cold...

During the new year celebration a idea of visiting the cabin and take a sauna took form. It's been a while since last time so it was about time!

It ended up with just three brave souls in the end and yesterday we went there. I was picked up on the way by Robert and his brother Johann, but before we drove the last leg we had to get something eat and some other stuff like matches and such.

We manage to buy something to eat and something to drink, but we drove back to my flat to get some ketchup and mustard for the hot dogs, almost out of town I remembered we had to get some charcoal for the BBQ! We made a short stop at another shop, came out with the coal and some potato crisps, when we arrived at the cabin I realised nobody had bought matches!


This was starting out good! But it would turn out that it wasn't going to be the worst thing...
There had been quite a lot of snow and there were some tracks in the snow leading down to the cabin, at first it looked like some animal tracks but when we got down to the cabin door I could not turn the key enough the open the lock, then I noticed that the lock cylinder had been pushed in to the lock!
Someone had hammered in the cylinder so there were no way to open the door, we were locked out! After checking all the windows we could establish that there had been no other break in attempts or broken windows!
We decided this was not going to stop us from having a sauna, so we pawed a track through the snow down to the sauna and started the fire to get it hot. During the time we waited for that we dug out the fireplace and started another fire on the outside.

Quick chilling the beer..Just chilling in the snow, the less strong beer froze first. :)

Fetching water.


Rest of us chilling by the fire.
The Jääcussi. (Joke for Finns only!)Didn't take long before it got dark. Took a while before the fire burned down enough to put the hot dogs on the glowing remains.After that Johann made a heroic effort to locate the stainless steel "afterburner cone" and drag it down to the sauna area. There we put it work! :)
After all that fun the sauna was hot enough for having a proper sauna! No photos of that, the camera was safe in the bag, lucky for you and lucky for me, it was really getting cold outside!

Robert was the bravest and went out to the hole in the ice for a quick swim! Not only that, on the way up from the ice cold water he lie down into the snow and made a "snow devil"! ;)

After a few more scoops of water on the hot stove and some more beers I made a run for it, made it, but I skipped the snow!

Johann hesitated for a very long time, but decided finally to make a run for it too (well, he was sober) and on his run back he unexpectedly dive in to the snow! I laughed so much I had a hard time to breath!

On the way back we stopped for a coffee break in Grängesberg. My clothes still smell of smoke from the BBQ...

4 comments:

  1. Too bad I got stuck in apathy, even if it all sounds like a quite bad day until the sauna got hot.

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  2. Yeah, started out less good but the wait for the sauna to get ready felt short, lot to do while waiting. :)

    Getting shoes on after sauna was interesting, they were so frozen that it was impossible to get ones foot in to them!

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  3. It was a very nice day at the sauna, even though we were forced of the "plesure" to spend all the time outside while the sauna was heating up.

    But the firepplace and hotdogs made up for that!

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  4. I am very, very lucky that the outside temperature was no less than -15 degree celcius. Otherwise, I think that my heart would have stopped after the "bath".
    Oh yes... A big star for Robert, because he dropped our sausauges in the fire! ...But Harri compensated it all a few minutes later... and dropped them in the snow :)

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