In keeping with my last post about places to sleep, I thought I'd share with you all this amazing hotel I discovered yesterday. It's called the Treehotel and it's located in the village Harads, which is about 60 km south of the Artic Circle, in Sweeden.
The Treehotel is made of six different super eco-friendly rooms in the middle of a forest. Each one was designed by a different well known architect or designer to be in harmony with nature. The six rooms are the Mirror Cube, The Cabin, The Bird's Nest, The UFO, A Room With a View, and The Blue Cone. You can check them all out on the Treehotel
website.
Below you'll find pictures of one of the rooms, the Mirror Cube, which was designed by Tham & Videgard Architects. It is made of light weight aluminum and plywood boxes hung around a tree trunk. The whole thing is covered in a mirror to make it virtually invisible to everyone but birds, which apparently can see the infrared film that is laminated into the glass panes to prevent them from colliding with it. Inside there is living space for two people, a double bed, bath, living room, and roof terrace. To get inside, you cross a rope bridge. Cool, huh?
External views
Internal views
The two pictures above are the view from outside the hostel Mitchell slept in the other night
This is looking over a sander below Skaftafell
According to Mitchell, this fluke of nature is called the church floor. Apparently the people who discovered it thought that this was church ruins (I guess that they thought it was floor tiles or something). But really, it's a natural formation of basalt columns that were sheared off by a glacier, leaving these tile like rocks. Sooo cool!
I'm celebrating yet another trip around the sun today. It's been a day punctuated with phone calls and birthday calls from Iceland, family visiting from Vermont, and a super yummy dinner of pork loin and squash topped off with a delicious snow man cake, just so we can pretend that it's winter again. 
