Reader\'s Digest Australia & New Zealand - June 2018

June• 2018 | 115

READER’S DIGEST

adream–whoneedstheaurora

borealis?”

But she woke me up at 1am any-

way, and again we tramped up into

thigh-deep snow. Stars, stillness.

At 3.30am she started awake from

a dream. “C’mon,” she said. “One

morelook.”Wetrudgedbackupto

the clearing.

“Oh,” I murmured. here was Orion

shooting his arrow, Cassiopeia, the

Pleiades. And there was something

moving between us and them. A scrim

of pale light, almost like a cloud, ex-

cept that it was crowning over the

trees and shooting rays across the sky.

Slowly, without sound, it was cas-

cadingingreatwaterfallsoflight,

shimmering in curtains the colour

ofclouds.Itfelt,tome,likethespirit

of winter, who has sung silently to

these forests since the beginning of

time.Kimreachedamittenedhand

formine,andwestoodintheclear-

ing, transfixed, until we could no

longerfeelouringersortoes.

weirdness. Owners Kent and Britta
Lindvall commissioned different
architects to build rooms up in the
pines. The most famous may be the
Mirrorcube, skewered on a single tree,
with mirrored surfaces that relect the
sky and boughs such that it seems to
disappear.
We were staying in the UFO. Stand-
ing at the base of a pine tree in the
sub-zero darkness, we pushed a but-
ton on the trunk andzmmmmm,a
ladder descended. Inside, the pod
had a projector that threw swimming
galaxies onto the curved walls. We lay
in the dark and drank tea and watched
them, knowing that this might be as
close as we would get to a light show.
At10.30pmweputonlongunder-
wear, boots and parkas, and climbed
downfromtheUFO.Wetromped
through the snow to a clearing.
Nothing.Notnothing–abillion
heedless stars. We climbed back
intoourspaceship.“It’sokay,”Kim
said. “his whole trip has been like

AROUND THE BEND

A Frenchman who drank excessive amounts of alcohol and

then drove 17 times round a roundabout said he had not

heard the sirens when police finally brought him to a halt. The

dizzying drive was not the 73-year-old’s first ofence of its

kind,Ouest Francenewspaper, which reported the tale, said

of the incident in Brittany, north-western France. The driver’s

licence was confiscated, it said.

REUTERS

FROMTRAVEL + LEISURE (FEBRUARY 2017) © 2017 PETER HELLER TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM