I can’t quite believe I’ve never reviewed this book before when it’s the reason I wrote my own book. Land of the Midnight Sun: My Arctic Adventures (affiliate link to bookshop.org) is a TV tie-in book by Alexander Armstrong to accompany his three-part ITV series which took him from Norway to Sweden, up to Svalbard… More Travel Library: Land of the Midnight Sun by Alexander Armstrong
What’s this? A Friday post? But the polar bear posts Mondays and Thursdays! Well, I’m doing Blogmas so there’s a winter/Christmas/ice/outdoors post every day until Christmas Eve. I’m going a bit old-school lifestyle blog today. This is a day in my life – and specifically, it’s a day in my life in winter. Now, finding… More A winter day in my life
Sparkle & Ice is my favourite of Girlguiding’s large-scale events. That’s partly because I’m a polar bear and I like things that are meant to be cold and/or wintery and partly because I like the weirdness of it. We don’t generally camp in the winter, because we’re not tough enough and the girls certainly aren’t… More Sparkle & Ice 2022: the warmest Sparkle ever!
Merry Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Holidays! Season’s Greetings! And all other variations on that theme! Today is Christmas Day and I can’t quite believe I’ve got a blog post scheduled for it. I thought I’d finish this Polar Bear Winter Festival by showing you what Christmas is like at my house so you can imagine… More Christmas à la Frost!
While I was at my cottage last week, in a rural bit of Somerset, I wanted to go for a walk. I had my daily 2km to walk – yes, even when I’m on holiday – and I’d invested in the cutest map. I knew Ordnance Survey offer custom maps (see my Single Map series… More A custom map, a muddy field and an unexpected hillfort
In my last post, my cottage tour, you may have caught a glimpse of my oven. Yes, it’s an Aga. I live in the countryside. That is, I live in the worst combination of the countryside, in what the Bortle Scale (the measure of the night sky’s brightness) calls rural/suburban transition. So we don’t have… More Country girl battles with Aga
I’m staying in a cottage! An actual cottage in a quaint little English village! My parents planned to go to Austria but for… reasons… I decided not to go with them, and then they didn’t go anyway. But I did have vague ideas of having a “wellness break” in December and so this is it.… More Winter cottage tour
I think it’s time for the Polar Bear Winter Festival to veer sharply from the wistful (“I miss Iceland and Svalbard and still can’t travel!”) to the everyday. I try to be outdoorsy and walking in winter is definitely a thing you can do. Enjoying the great outdoors is fine in summer. Everyone wants to… More Walking in winter
Ten years ago tomorrow, I went to Iceland for the very first time. Ten years ago on Thursday or Friday, I decided that I wanted to live here and because I’m the practical sort and I don’t rush in, I decided that I wanted to be living in Iceland within the next ten years. You… More Ten years of Iceland
I’ve been yearning just a little bit to go to Svalbard lately and I knew I wanted a post about the place in the Polar Bear Winter Festival, because what’s more wintery than a frozen archipelago in the High Arctic? But I wasn’t sure what to write about. So I had a look at what… More Svalbard: the polar bear story