By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Editor
The first time I ever heard of the phenomenon known as the Northern Lights was when I picked up a copy of Neither Here Nor There, a book by travel writer Bill Bryson. Its cover promised first-person travel tales of traveling through Europe. A quick glance showed chapters on Rome, Paris, Italy, Switzerland and other desirable places and revealed Bryson to be a comedic writer who was not afraid to make fun of himself. So I purchased it.
The first chapter covered him going to a place called Hammerfest in the far northern reaches of Norway to experience the Northern Lights. To get there, he had to endure a 30-hour bus ride from Oslo and once there, he found a freezing, isolated and rather boring town. Because of the unpredictably of nature, he spent nearly three weeks there. It was not exacty springtime in Paris. But when he saw the Northern Lights, he was transformed, writing that “it was the most beautiful thing I have sever seen…The display of lights went on forever. They were of only one color, that errier luminous green you see on radar screens but the activity was frantic. Narrow swirls of light would sweep across the great dome of the sky, then hang there like vapor trails.”
He also wrote that it was all silent. “Such activity seemed to demand at the very least the occasional low boom or series of staticlike crackles, but there was none,” he stated.
And ever since then, I have been both curious and fascinated by the Northern Lights. Tho, based on Bryson’s account, I am unlikely to travel to Hammerfest to see them. Fortunately, I don’t have to go there or even leave the lower 48 of United States. There are also some pretty interesting locations in Canada, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and, yes, even Norway. To find them, Travel + Leisure has published a story titled: 12 Best Places to See the Northern Lights Around the World.
In the order of how they appear in the article, here is the list:
• Fairbanks, Alaska
• Norway
• Finland
• Greenland
• The Yukon Territory, Canada
• Scotland
• Churchill, Canada
• Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania
• Iceland
• Sweden
• Voyager’s National Park, Montana
• Headlands, International Dark Sky Park, Michigan
You can view the list and descriptions of these places in the article here.
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