Married couple Diane and Greg Stanley-Horn from Ontario, Canada, celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary with their children Jeddah (8) and Nolan (6) with a two-week trip to Europe. They experienced New Year’s Eve in London, which the boys thought was great.

– Wow, what fireworks there were in London, said the two little boys in English.

The family is no stranger to travel and has traveled to large parts of the world. However, they are very impressed with the ice hotel they are staying at.

– How cool, isn’t it! So cool that we are the first guests this season. We searched for ice hotels and northern lights on the internet and booked a trip to Norway.

The ice hotel has reopened its doors for the 15th time. The couple say they went to the Viking Museum in Oslo and rented a car in Tromsø to drive to Sommarøya in search of the Northern Lights.

– We haven’t seen it yet, but we hope to experience it before we return in two days.

Stanley-Horn says they were very surprised to find an ice hotel with Vikings made of ice where they were supposed to stay.

– The quality of the construction and decorations is impressive, says Greg.

The family studies the sculptures inside the common area where a series of ancient kings in war gear are frozen in their movements.

– We have never opened such a large hotel so early before, Tor Kjetil Wisløff told Nordlys last night after the inauguration of perhaps Alta’s most internationally known building. Along with a dozen workers, they worked hard to complete the work before the guests arrived.

– When we opened the bottle of Champagne at a quarter to six, the first visitors were already there, smiles Wisløff.

– However, we are not there yet. We had problems with the lights and we are still missing some of the decoration. We anticipate it will take a few days before everything is completely in place.

Sorrisniva built the hotel a little differently than before. Now the common areas are significantly larger and this has been done with the mass tourism of cruise ships arriving from mid-February in mind.

– We learned that we need better logistics to move several hundred people through the facility while several busloads of tourists wait outside.

With 32 rooms ready to welcome winter tourists, the company wants to offer its customers different accommodation in minus 4 degrees.

– We slept very well and it was not cold, conclude the Canadians.