It’s a special privilege to see your favourite band live in concert. I honestly thought I’d never have the opportunity to see Kent (mostly because geography placed us on opposite ends of the globe) but then they announced that 2016 would be their final year together and the autumn/winter tour would be their last ever concerts. Before I knew it I was planning a trip to Kiruna.
Honestly, it was the most special musical experience of my life.
The day of the concert had arrived and I was super excited. I had some admin to attend to before then (namely buying my train ticket to Abisko) so took a walk to the train station. But as with almost everything in Kiruna, this simple task turned out to be truly bizarre.
The pills and super comfy bed did the trick in bannishing the previous night’s hellish migrane, and I woke bright and early in Stockholm, ready to head north to Swedish Lapland.
I’d originally planned to go straight from Stockholm to Kiruna, but thought better play it safe and fly the next day rather than risk missing the flight. So I stayed a night near Arlanda airport, (at the coolest hostel: STF Jumbo Stay – a decommissioned 747) and took a bus to nearby Uppsala for a daytrip.
This time last year a dream of mine came true – well, several dreams actually: I made a musical pilgrimage beyond the Arctic Circle (to a small mining town in Swedish Lapland) to watch my favourite band perform in an airport hangar, after which I went to the other side of the country to watch another one of my favourite bands play a small club show. Along the way I slept aboard a decommissioned 747 and an old cruise ship, saw Scandinavia’s tallest church and Sweden’s second deepest lake, stood beneath the northern lights in Kiruna and ate wild blueberries in Abisko, met some great people and a wild moose family and spent a small fortune on food and souvenirs.
It’s taken me a year but over the next few posts I’ll be uploading some of the (8000!) photos I took during my trip, but first a little background on why I went…
