Chasing Auroras

Everything happens for a reason

Hello lovely,

Back in November of 2022, myself and Mum visited New York for the third time. I longed to fulfil my dream of ice skating on the many rinks, and Mum dreamed of visiting Niagara Falls.

We planned our trip meticulously, making sure to cram in all the things we wanted to tick off but hadn’t had chance to during our previous trips — like finally walking along the Brooklyn Bridge!

It was an incredible trip and we made so many core memories that I will treasure forever. But sadly, Niagara wasn’t to be… The night before we were due to travel there it was cancelled. As you can imagine, Mum was truly gutted.

A freak snowstorm with 6ft of snow covered upstate NY and with it, buried Mum’s dream overnight. We had booked a guided tour to see the American side of the falls, and then to cross the border to check into a hotel for the night before seeing the Canadian side the following day — it was meant to be perfect.

However, as we all know, we cannot control the weather, so instead we wallowed in our sadness with free drinks from our hotel’s happy hour before heading for some food and calling it a night.

In the end, as they always say — things happen for a reason — so we made back up plans and instead visited the Edge just after the sun had set, celebrating our trip with rooftop cocktails, and watching as all of Manhattan twinkled against the ink-blank sky.

I still struggle to put into words just how much that whole trip meant to us both, but I’ve always felt this pang of sadness that Mum didn’t get to tick off one of her dreams.

A year or so later, we decided that as a family we would book a trip to Iceland. Iceland being another of Mum’s dream destinations, in the hopes of seeing the Northern Lights and visiting the Blue Lagoon.

In May, people all over the UK had the chance of witnessing the magic of the Northern Lights, from their own back gardens. I remember waiting up for a few hours but not getting a glimpse. Then scrolling social media the next morning to find that pretty much everyone had seen them! We were all so annoyed we missed them, but hung onto the hope of still seeing them in Iceland later on in the year.

One thing we didn’t know, was that before we booked the trip, 2024 was due to be one of the best years to see the aurora borealis, due to the heightened solar activity.

The chance to see them again in the UK cropped up just over a week before our Iceland trip. I stood in our garden, bundled in my dressing gown, hoping once again to catch a glimpse — and boy did we! I messaged Mum straight away and we all managed to see the bold fuschia tones dance across the sky (albeit through our phone cameras).

We felt hopeful. Only a few days before we left, the weather forecast for Iceland was dismal — rain everyday. We thought to ourselves that at least we’d seen them in the UK, almost a way of softening the blow should we not be so lucky on our travels.

There’s a saying however in Iceland that if you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes and it will change. Which we later found out to be true!

Once again, we had a professional guided tour booked to see the lights, which didn’t go so well. That night my husband was ill and it rained the whole night. So, we all stood in the cold rain, searching for small gaps in the clouds in hopes of witnessing them, to no avail.

On our final night, after a long 12-hour day on the Golden Circle tour, I too hadn’t been feeling so well throughout the day and had planned to have a rest in the hotel before we all headed back out again for the evening. The very moment I crawled into bed, an alert on my phone popped up from my aurora app, saying that if the skies were clear, there was a chance to see the elusive lights within the next hour.

My husband headed down to the harbour just by chance to see if the app was correct, and 10 minutes later he phoned me, saying the lights had made an appearance from behind the clouds!

I raced down to meet him, frantically phoning the rest of the family so they could join us, when I reached the harbour in Reykjavik, the sky almost a midnight blue, the full moon off to the side and right there in the middle, the green waves were dancing to a beat of their own.

Seeing them with a naked eye, as if watching over us, and seeing the pure elation on Mum’s face is something I will never forget. All of us together under the faint green glow of the magic that is the aurora borealis was truly breathtaking.

Iceland was the trip of a lifetime, and we are all already so eager to go back!

I guess the moral of this story is that everything does happen for a reason. To be patient with our dreams and accept that everything will happen in its own time.

Perhaps one day we are meant to return as a family to witness Niagara Falls, and that something better than we could ever imagine is always just around the corner.

Have you experienced something similar before? The feeling of your dreams fading, only to surprise you in an unimaginable way… Let me know below.