I Am A Polar Bear

It’s my blog’s tenth birthday this week. Ok, it’s a bit hard to pin down a firm date for when it started, since it went through at least two names & addresses (Limestone & Lava and Footprints in the Lava are the two I particularly remember) and probably half a dozen purposes before settling down but I registered the domain ten years ago tomorrow and May 2015 is when I have my earliest statistics from. So it’s ten this week. It’s older than my oldest Brownie – I’ve been writing a travel blog for longer than my little yellows have been alive!

My goal for my blog has never been fame or fortune – well, for a start, you don’t get that through blogging, you need to be on something more video-centric – but I’ve occasionally hoped for a little pocket money. How much have I earned from it? £60, my first and only Adsense payout which must have been around this time last year. I spent it on a Swarovski polar bear bracelet, to match the earrings I bought myself in 2020 and the necklace I had for my birthday a few weeks later. I don’t exactly surround myself with polar bears but I like to wear the jewellery, I have two soapstone polar bears on my desk and I made a polar bear coaster at a fused glass workshop once. If you’re going to make your blog a significant chunk of your life and identity, you’re allowed to have a few souvenirs around the place.

How much have I spent on the blog? Not telling. I don’t know and I don’t care to look it up. In order to have ads, I went hosted for probably seven or eight years before crashing it into the ground last year. Not advised. It was a money pit and eventually even I gave up on “surely it’ll make some pocket money soon??”. Now I’m on WordPress’s Premium plan, which costs £7 a month, which makes it one of the cheaper hobbies out there.

So no fortune. Fame? Nah. And yet… despite the fact that I so rarely advertise it that most people (family & colleagues included) don’t know it exists, it gets what I regard as quite respectable viewing figures. I’ve posted twice a week without fail since 2016. 2015 was all over the place. Three posts on three consecutive days, then nothing for two months. I’ve since discovered scheduling and planning and thanks simply to the power of showing up regularly, my visitor numbers have increased 1355% between 2016 and 2024, my first and last full years of statistics. Of course, what I’m delighted to get in a year, some people are disappointed to get in a day but I definitely get more than I deserve. 2024, as any blogger knows, just fell off a cliff but 2025 is so far sufficiently improved on 2023 that if we pretend last year never happened, I’ve got satisfying continual growth.

In 2016/17 I had a popular post (by my standards and of several years ago at that!) about a gorge in Iceland. It was an obscure enough gorge and a popular enough post (for the time!) that I became convinced everyone visiting it was doing so because they’d read my blog and that they were looking at me as I scrambled up to it, whispering “it’s actually her!” to each other. Oh, you naive, egotistical fool! (Who hadn’t slept the night before because some idiot parked up next to her and left their van engine running all. night and so was in a mood anyway) The only people who recognise travel creators are other travel creators. This is part of the reason I don’t tend to screech about my blog on Instagram or, in the olden days, on Twitter as much as I should. 90% of my followers are kind, polite follow-backs from other travel creators. And great as many of them are, I don’t think they’re my target audience. The vast majority of them already know more about everything; there’s no point in advertising to them.

Besides, I had no idea that the Rauðfelgjá post was a tiny newborn compared to two posts that were to blow up later on. The first was a post about the first episode of Zac Efron’s Down to Earth, which was about wellness and energy and took place in Iceland. I explained where the places are, mapped them, showed what they look like in real life and drew up a better route than the one they claimed to follow on TV, which had them bouncing backwards and forwards between Reykjavík and the Golden Circle in an utterly illogical way. That post became second only to the official website when you searched Zac Efron Iceland. It was my runaway most popular post for two solid years and still rarely dips out of the top 5. In a story, this would be the post that changed my life, led me to quit my job and brought me to meet Zac. Hah. This is real life. 

The second post was one called Z: the deleted letter, which was the final part of my 2019 A-Z of Iceland series. It was a bit of a sleeper hit – no one read it when it was new but occasionally someone would stumble across it, post it to r/TodayILearned and I’d have a spike in visitor statistics for 36 hours. The September 2022 spike was particularly massive. No one’s read it in a while, though.

Another couple of noteworthy posts are two Girlguiding Kit List posts, relics of my very early blog days, which explain what a bedding roll and what a plate bag are. You can see exactly when parents get given kit lists with these peculiar items on became those two posts rise from the dead every year between June and August before vanishing again. “What are they?”, the parents ask their Guides and the girls shrug, having not paid attention during meetings. But I’m here to answer all the questions! 

So, having established that I’m making no money for this and not really even getting the ego-stroking from massive views, why do I do it? Why have I effectively given myself an unpaid part-time job on top of my actual job and Guiding commitments? Because I’m a writer! If I deleted my blog right now, I’d have started a new one by the morning. I don’t keep a diary. I don’t particularly paint. I express myself through words and I can’t stop that. In fact, I do have another blog. On top of two posts a week here, I have a paddling blog as part of a campaign to snap another unpaid part-time job (if this doesn’t happen, I’m burning it down in October), I have a travel blog/diary that I write “live” to tell my mum I’m not dead and I’m trying to start an “I’m older and wiser than you children” lifestyle-type blog – the trouble with that is that I’m not sure I have a lifestyle so much as an overstuffed patchwork chaotic existence and trying to follow even roughly the template of existing lifestyle content simply does not work for me.

And, of course, other than the post where ChatGPT and I both wrote an itinerary for Reykjavík in order to point out that the human version is better, every word of this blog is written by me. Apart from anything else, if you have a craving to write embedded in your soul, getting AI to do the writing doesn’t scratch the brain-itch at all.

The other thing I have is two books and a third in progress. I self-published the first, A Polar Night’s Tale, in 2017 to resounding silence (and a particularly supportive “self-published books are always crap” from my dad) after several people read my other travel blog, said “it’s really good, you should write a book” (it was particularly noticeable that none of those people bought a copy) and eventually I took it off sale. I finished the second, Lava Land: On the Ring Road a little over a year ago, sent copies to cheerleaders Tom and his mum, and so far have just left it on my shelf. Ego-wise, it more or less satisfies me merely that they exist but probably what I should do is look into Amazon self-publishing, get them up there and make some noise about them. Never hurts to “diversify income streams” – or attempt to actually sell the books you put all that effort into writing. The third, as yet untitled and unfinished, is about baths, bathing culture, hot water, steam – Finnish saunas, Tbilisi sulphur baths, Icelandic geothermal pools, that sort of thing. Give me a title for it, please, the working title is The Bath Book and that’s awful.

Where do I see all this going in the next ten years? Still a polar bear? Oh, I’m sure I’ll still be writing. I’m sure this blog will still exist, because I can’t see me just folding it up and putting it away after all these years. Shall I repeat “I’d like it to bring in a little pocket money” or shall I just leave that in the box of unfulfillable daydreams? It’s not going to happen. It’s the wrong platform for it. But it’s mine and there’s value both in that in itself and in the work of the last decade. Tell you what would be nice – to finally be happy with my categories and tags. To quote my boss, a taxonomy should be “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”. In other words, everything should fit, and in just one place. But my posts refuse to work quite like that and insist on overlapping. So to get it organised to my satisfaction would be nice.

I like to travel and I love to write and as long as I’m still able to travel – or as long as I have material lying unused or that needs to be pulled out, rewritten and republished – I will keep writing about it. When I have nothing to write about, I’ll probably just find a new subject. I can already see the possibilities flooding in.

But for now, I have a travel blog and it’s ten years old this week.