Dubai Finland Courchevel 2025
For Christmas 2025 we embarked on a huge trip from Sydney to Dubai, on to Finland, then on to Courchevel France, back to Dubai and then finally back to Sydney.
It was a huge trip and a lot of fun, first off was Dubai where we stayed at the Palm Royal. It's got one of the best breakfast bars on the planet and was very convenient for us to get to the waterpark next door. Dubai in winter was actually quite cold though so the water park was fun but not the boiling normal that we were used to! We also got to go to Carbone which had just opened. Amy had been to the one in NYC previously.
We then flew to Helsinki and then on to Rovaniemi which is of course the home of Santa. We got to meet Santa twice, we also got to do dog sled riding, snowmobiling, ice karting and more.
It was really good fun, we missed the northern lights by an hour though, our glass roof huts were perfect for it but we fell asleep at 19h00 and the lights apparently were on at 20h00 - although now we have reason to go back!
We had one day in Helsinki where we visited a market that was just down the road and stayed in a hotel which used to be the Finnish sniper headquarters!
This is where I started to get chills and annoying was a bit sick for the rest of the trip, eventually giving it to Evie, Oscar and eventually Amy! We pushed through though even though we probably had Flu or COVID!
We flew to Geneva in Switzerland and the got a 2 hour transfer to Courchevel, which is probably the most beautiful ski resort you can go to.
We stayed at Fouquet's Courchevel which was absolutely amazing. The euro is extremely expensive though I couldn't really get over it, Evie's spaghetti with cheese was $100AUD every night (and she ate two mouth fulls with her sickness). We had Christmas at the hotel and it was fantastic, the food was amazing (although very rich every day) and they had a man come and cut a silhouette of Oscar and Evie at Christmas dinner (which is actually on Christmas eve).
The snow was thin but the green runs were so wide an a lot of fun the days we got out there.
We then flow back to Dubai and stayed at Bab Al Shams our favourite desert hotel, however most of the family was sick by now so we really just recuperated there and then got on our flight back to Sydney!