Last night I slept again under some sort of a shelter and thus was able to leave the tent's rain fly away. Oh what a good idea!

The nights are somewhere around -4 degrees at the moment and I still sleep comfortable without my full set of warm clothes [jacket, hat etc]. However, it's usually around 2AM when I wake up with a cold nose and cold ears. I then put my head into my sleeping bag [a bit like a turtle] and continue sleeping. Not so tonight.

By 2AM I wake up. It's cold. The skies have cleared up from the cloud coverage and I can watch a beautiful night sky and the stars. I even see some shooting stars. Just a few small, but quite fast moving clouds are left. Wait, these are no clouds...

I've never seen the northern lights before, so I first mistake them as clouds. It's white in the beginning but quickly changes colors to green tonight. The light dances around like crazy and the reflections in the calm lake make it a sheer spectacle.

For about 10 minutes I take some pictures. I even go out of the tent in my underwear to capture the reflections in the lake. After very few moments I have to go back because my shivering doesn't help the pictures much. I could get my tripod, but I am too lazy. The pictures that I have are enough to revive my memory later.

I watch the whole show for more than two and a half hours before I decide to get some more sleep. It was a magical expirience.

Quite a bit of sleep deprivation and the headwind don't make for good progress today. After only 85km I decide to call it a day. This is not really how I imagined the riding to be but I want to start nice and early tomorrow, to avoid some wind in the morning [the last days it always picked up in the afternoon].