# want to see santa!!!



## hannah29 (Feb 13, 2006)

has anyone taken their motorhome to Lapland??? we are thinking of going around christmas time to take the kids to see santa so we can prove he does exist :wink: 
we are unsure whether to drive all the way taking trains and ferries where necessary obviously or leaving the camper on route and flying the last bit having a couple of nights in a hotel and heading back....

any thoughts or advice?????


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## Rapide561 (Oct 1, 2005)

*Lapland*

Hi

Where do you class as Lapland?

One holiday firm I worked for used Norway as their daytrip agenda, whilst another used Iceland!

Well for Norway - easy - direct from Newcastle - would your motorhome be upto the weather? Campsites not likely to be open.

Iceland - more complicated - drive to Aberdeen, then ferry to Lerwick, then change on to a Smyril Lines ferry to Iceland. Campsites not open!

Rapide561


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## hannah29 (Feb 13, 2006)

we would be heading for rovaniemi. we have a fairly new winterised motorhome (euramobil) which we regularly go skiing with and have been in temperatures of -26 overnight with no trouble....we realise it may be slightly colder than this hence the thinking of only driving so far up and then going in a cosy hotel for a couple of nights whilst we see santa and hopefully get to see the northern lights and maybe do a spot of skiing too with any luck


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## SiStew (May 1, 2005)

Hannah29

If you don't mind us piggy-backing onto your post, we would also be interested to hear of anyone with experience of such a trip as; having just bought our first 'van, a visit to see Santa with our 4 boys is high on our to-do list too.


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## hannah29 (Feb 13, 2006)

we are definately serious about this.....our plans are for hubby to drive out and me and the kids to fly due to school hols. he will meet us at tampere where we will go from there up to rovaniemi together. flights from stansted for me and two kids on 19th dec returning on the 27th are less than 300 with ryanair. we may drive back with him though we are not decided yet. i have just found the tourist info website for rovaniemi at

http://tourism.rovaniemi.fi/?deptid=6335

which lists 2 campsites. santaland is only 8km from here and there are regular buses.....also its not as cold there as i would have expected looking at the site weather and climate page.

please post any other info you may have


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## teemyob (Nov 22, 2005)

*Finland or thin Ice*

Ho Ho Ho,

I have been trying to Convince my wife Ann-Marie to do this for 12 months (see my very recent posts on last trips at Christmas. I wanted to do it last Christmas but she said it was too far so we ended up driving 3000 miles or so to Round Trip Southern Spain!

When we came back from Spain The verdicts came back as "Norway was much nicer last year".

I fancied driving through the |Eurotunnel| and if I have got this correct;

Through France - Belgium - Germany - Denmark-|Oresund Crossing| - sweden And Finaly onto Finland.

Q Is it not too far?
A NO
Q What if we get stuck in the Snow Ann-Marie Asks?
A More chance of getting stick on the M11 in January Love
Q What if it is too Cold?
A We have a Winterised EuraMobil with gas and Diesel Heating
Q What if The kids (ours are 24, 18 &16) don't like it?
A We can take someone elses instead, besides I WILL LIKE IT
Q It is a long Drive?
A we can share it
Q Do our old snow chains fit the new van?
A Santa can buy me some new ones

I won't go on you get the picture.

I had also considred getting the ferry from Newcastle to Kristiansand but like the idea of the aforementioned route (Before Jeremy Clarkson did it).

SO!

If there are more vanners interested mayve we could all hook-up somewhere or start some sort of Rally?

If anyone else is interested please do piggy back the post. I can't say I can convince Annie but the more that are interested the better.

All those in favour join on - the rest can always get a cheap flight and meet us there...............................................................................................

Awaits in anticipation

Trev


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## Rapide561 (Oct 1, 2005)

*Visiting Santa*

Hi

If you are going to Lapland, then I suggest you trawl through the net and look at tour companies who are offering day trips etc. Find as many as you can and then plan your visit when they are not going.

I have seen it all before - 5 planes loads of tourists - some kids never saw Santa.

Rapide561


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## Pusser (May 9, 2005)

I have heard that Santa Claus may have to close down his factory. First of all, the minimum wage is causing all sorts of finanncial problems and he lost his sleigh licence last year for speeding offences. You can imagine how fast he was going to get around the world in 24 hours. He is also awaiting prosecution for drink driving having had an estimated 60 million glasses of sherry putting him well over the limit.

Then of course animal rights campaigners are up in arms about cruelty to reindeers and Santa has just been issued a summons from the council as his Grotto does not have planning permission.

It is a sad time for all children and me.


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## billym (Dec 17, 2005)

We always had dreams of going to see Father Christmas ( not Santa ) and looked into it. Whilst doing so we met a family who had just done it in a Hymer. They said it was a nightmare , 15 days of hell. They also said that because they had not gone on an organised trip the fees for the activities associated with such a trip were far higher.
They put us off the idea but there again we have no spirit of adventure !


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## Rapide561 (Oct 1, 2005)

*Father Christmas*

Hi

Yes, Father Christmas is much preferred as a titel, bearing in mind that Santa is an anagram of Satan!

Rapide561


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## Pusser (May 9, 2005)

*Re: Father Christmas*



Rapide561 said:


> Hi
> 
> Yes, Father Christmas is much preferred as a titel, bearing in mind that Santa is an anagram of Satan!
> 
> Rapide561


If that has significance, Dog does very well.


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## klubnomad (Mar 6, 2006)

Santa has a huge market: there are 2,106 million children aged under eighteen in the world, according to the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF. Given the pagan origins of the festival and the emphasis on charity, we can assume that Santa will deliver presents to each and every child and not just Christian children or the 191 million who live in industrialised countries. It is Christmas after all.

Assume there are 2.5 children per house. That means Santa has to make 842 million stops on Christmas Eve. Now let's say these homes are spread equally across the land masses of the planet. The Earth's surface area is, given a radius of 6,400km(3,986 miles), 510,000,000 sq km (196,600,000 sq miles), calculated as radius squared, multiplied by 4 pi. Only 29 per cent of the surface of the planet is land, so this narrows the populated area to 150,000,000 sq km (57,9000,000 sq miles). Each household therefore occupies an area of 0.178 sq km (0.069 sq miles). Let's assume that each home occupies the same sized plot, so the distance between each household is the square root of the area, which is 0.42 km (0.26 miles).

Every Christmas Eve, Santa has to travel a distance equivalent to the number of chimneys - 842 million - multiplied by this average spacing between households, which works out to be 365 million km (221 million miles). This sounds daunting, particularly given that he must cover this distance in a single night. Fortunately, Santa has more than twenty-four hours in which to deliver the presents. Consider the first point on the planet to go through the International Date Line at midnight on 24 December. From this moment on, Santa can pop down chimneys. If he stays right there, he will have twenty-four hours to deliver presents to everyone along the date line. But he can do better than this, by travelling backwards, against the direction of rotation of the Earth. That way he can deliver presents for almost twenty-four hours to everywhere else on Earth, making forty-eight hours in all, which is 2,880 minutes or 172,800 seconds. From this, one can calculate that Santa has little over two ten-thousandths of a second to get between each of the 842 million households. To cover the total distance of 356 million km (221 million miles) in this time means that his sleigh is moving at an average of 2,060 km (1,279 miles) per second. Ignoring quibbles about air temperature and humidity, the speed of sound is something like 1,200 km (750 miles) per hour, or 0.3 km (0.2 miles) per second, so Santa is achieving speeds of around 6,395 times the speed of sound, or Mach 6395.

When a sleigh, or indeed any object, exceeds the speed of sound, there will be at least one sonic boom. This is a shock wave sent out when the sleigh catches up with pressure waves it generates while moving, explains Nigel Weatherill of the University of Wales, Swansea, who helped the Thrust Supersonic Car break the sound barrier in 1997. Santa, however, does not generate any sonic booms on Christmas Eve. In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins says he has used this fact to disprove the existence of Santa to a six-year-old child. To a biologist this may indeed seem persuasive but, to an aerodynamics engineer, it suggests that Santa has found a way to suppress sonic booms. For example, says Nigel Weatherill, perhaps Santa cancels the peaks and troughs in the shock wave with troughs and peaks of 'antisound' generated by a specialised speaker on his sleigh.

The speed of light is absolute and cannot be exceeded, so we should check that Santa is not breaking cosmic law. The usual figure for the speed of light is 300 million meters per second (984 million feet) which, given that there are 1,000 metres per kilometre (5,280 feet per mile), works out to be 300,000 km (186,000 miles) per second. Santa is comfortably within this limit, travelling at around one-145th of the speed of light - too slow to worry about the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity. This assumes, however, that Santa throws the presents down the chimney while passing overhead. In fact, he stops at each house so that he has to achieve double the speed calculated above (form a standing start, he has to travel the distance between each house in two-10,000ths of a second). That means going from 0 to 4,116 km (2,558 miles) per second in two-10,000ths of a second, an acceleration of 20.5 million kilometres (12.79 million miles) per second per second, or 20.5 billion metres (67.3 billion feet) per second per second. 

The acceleration due to gravity is a mere 9.8 metres (32ft) per second per second, so the acceleration of Santa's sleigh is equivalent to about two billion times that caused by the gravitational tug of the Earth. Given that Santa is excessively overweight, say around 200kg (30 stone), the force he will feel is his mass times his acceleration: around 4,000 billion newtons. Even fighter pilots can't cope with accelerations more than a few times that of gravity: they have to use special breathing and so called g-suits to keep the blood in their head. Santa would have to cope with around 2 billion times this acceleration. As the physics professor Lawrence Krauss put it, that would reduce our fat friend to 'chunky salsa'.
Krauss has considered similar problems in his work on the physics of Star Trek. The starship Enterprise gets by with devices called 'inertial dampers' to cushion the forces that Captain Kirk feels in the seat of his pants. Santa has to resort to similar tactics, creating an artificial world within his sleigh in which the reaction force that responds to the accelerating force is cancelled, perhaps by some kind of gravitational field.

There is one other problem Santa has to contend with. His cargo of toys. Assuming that each of the 2,106 million children gets nothing more than a medium -sized construction set (900g or 2lb), he has a load of 1,895 million kg (4212 million lb) to convey. Then there is also his supply of fuel to achieve these huge speeds. Any way you look at it, Santa has some serious hurdles to overcome. The US Air Force 48th Fighter Wing claims to use satellite dishes to track Santa on Christmas Eve, with other Air Force Space Command squadrons around the world, to prevent the unnecessary scrambling of interceptor aircraft and ensure the safe arrival of 'the Jolly Old Elf' and all his presents. 'We have some of the most sophisticated equipment in the world. The deep space tracking system was constructed at a cost of over $600 million. Santa is in good hands,' said Tech. Sgt. Ray Duron, Crew Chief of the 5th Space Surveillance Squadron at RAF Feltwell, which coordinates the route of his sleigh with the 1st Command and Control Squadron in Colorado Springs.

Given the extraordinary array of technology already used by Santa, much of which is beyond the capabilities of the US military, this annual 'Santa Track' - which dates back to 1957 - seems unnecessary. Indeed, some might say it is merely a publicity stunt engineered by defence scientists to draw attention away from the vast range of scientific and technological achievements pioneered by Santa to ensure children across the world are not disappointed on Christmas morning.


Dave

656


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## Rapide561 (Oct 1, 2005)

*Christmas shopping*

Hi Dave

That's a fabulous post.

Rapide561


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## Pusser (May 9, 2005)

656 said:


> Santa has a huge market: there are 2,106 million children aged under eighteen in the world, according to the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF. Given the pagan origins of the festival and the emphasis on charity, we can assume that Santa will deliver presents to each and every child and not just Christian children or the 191 million who live in industrialised countries. It is Christmas after all.
> 
> Assume there are 2.5 children per house. That means Santa has to make 842 million stops on Christmas Eve. Now let's say these homes are spread equally across the land masses of the planet. The Earth's surface area is, given a radius of 6,400km(3,986 miles), 510,000,000 sq km (196,600,000 sq miles), calculated as radius squared, multiplied by 4 pi. Only 29 per cent of the surface of the planet is land, so this narrows the populated area to 150,000,000 sq km (57,9000,000 sq miles). Each household therefore occupies an area of 0.178 sq km (0.069 sq miles). Let's assume that each home occupies the same sized plot, so the distance between each household is the square root of the area, which is 0.42 km (0.26 miles).
> 
> ...


No wonder he got a ticket


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## teemyob (Nov 22, 2005)

*The Ice is starting to crack*

Hello,

The 15 days of hell will put the Mrs. off. Hard enough convincing Ann-Marie the journey is worth it.

So anyone who has any positive comments on the idea?

Trev


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## 1946 (Jan 5, 2006)

Last year I took my son to Rovaniemi but by plane and did it as a daytrip. It was fabulous. We arrived midday ( their time) and it was nearly dark. The coach took us to the village, which was 15 minutes drive. It was all organised in such a way that there was time to do everything. After a busy day with sleighrides and reindeer rides and meeting the big man we flew home late at night. 
I hope you will get there one way or the other. 

Maddie


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## Pusser (May 9, 2005)

I Father Christmas visits Milton Keynes shopping center around Chrissy time. This may be a cheaper option.


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