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I Am A Polar Bear

Travel, adventure & wellness with plenty of snow

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  • Travel
    • By country
      • Nordic & Scandinavian
        • Denmark
        • Finland
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          • Svalbard
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    • By type
      • Daycations
      • Weekends away
        • Cheese & Chocolate (2026)
        • Parc Asterix (2025)
        • Christmas in London (2025)
      • Road Trips
        • A Birthday On the Ring Road (2025)
        • Accidental Ring Road (2023)
        • The Quest for a Volcano (2022)
      • Train Adventures
        • The Original Spa (2025)
        • Great German Spa Towns (2025)
        • The Eras Train Tour (2024)
      • Short Breaks
        • The Romanian Do-Over (2025)
        • A Short Trip to Pula (2025)
        • Reykjavik in Black & White (2024)
      • Longer Trips
        • Traversing Cyprus & Georgia (2024)
        • The Russian Odyssey (2019)
        • The Laugavegur Diaries (2018)
      • Year Abroad
      • School Trips
    • Unique Places to Stay
  • Adventures
    • Water
    • Snow
    • Land
    • Height
    • Indoors
      • Girlguiding
  • Wellness
  • YouTube

Videos

My YouTube channel so far. I’m always planning to make more but I’m spectacularly awkward in front of the camera so I don’t do it as often as I’d like.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/embed?listType=playlist&list=UUVuWf7agr1s6FkyXZkiax3g&layout=gallery%5B/embedyt%5D

Who am I?
I'm Julie, a travel, adventure and wellness blogger. I love Iceland, I love jumping into hot water and I do love a bit of snow.

  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Bluesky

Most popular posts

  • Zedwell Capsule Hotel review: what's it like to sleep in a coffin?
  • How do the lockers work at the Blue Lagoon?
  • Reynisfjara has been washed away. Now what?
  • Gallic Christmas at Parc Asterix
  • Tent review: Eurohike Sendero 4 vs Cairns 5 DLX
I didn’t have a lot booked or planned for my trip to Helsinki but I did book a sunrise swim at Allas Sea Pool, a geothermal pool floating in the harbour. Or, as I discovered when I got there, frozen into eighteen or so inches of solid ice. Did getting up at 7am to walk 1.5km at minus several degrees feel offputting? Yes! Did the run from the showers to the pool in nothing but a thin towel feel offputting? Yes! Did I then discover that my lungs attempted to close up after swimming a few lengths in the relatively warm water? Yes! I’ve spent the last nearly a week in Helsinki, where it’s averaged about -10°C during the day. I’ve tried out four different saunas & pools, discovered aqua jogging, had cloudberry juice with my breakfast, had a successful train adventure to Finland’s old capital and right now I’m in the longest queue for passport control that I’ve ever seen (taking back control, yay! /s) with a bag of korvapuusti, Finnish cinnamon rolls, in my carry on. Blogs will be coming next week - I think I’ve got four or five planned at the moment. Time to talk about The Bath Book, which is the book I’m really struggling to write about hot water, baths, steam, bathing culture and all that good stuff (and the excuse for a few trips I’ve done over the last 18 months). It tends to slide down my priority list but if it’s here on Instagram every month, I have to have an update every month, so I have to sit down and write occasionally. I started this because so many people went skiing in January and now we’re finishing off with my attempts at snowboarding. I started far too old - if I can’t manage one plank, how am I meant to manage two? Luckily, there’s a whole world of other fun you can have in the snow. This week, a storm basically washed away Reynisfjara, one of Iceland’s most popular tourist attractions and most beautiful beaches. It’s like a giant hand reached out and just clawed away the beach, leaving a miniature cliff up by the path. Such is coastal erosion. But does it solve the problem of it being one of Iceland’s most dangerous places or make it worse? I started doing my adventures in the snow because so many people have been skiing this year and what I’m discovering is that I’ve had a lot of snow and ice adventures! This is my first time ice climbing and I wasn’t very good at it. I tried it again later in the year and was surprised that with no practice in between, I wasn’t better at it the second time. Landmannalaugar is generally a summer expedition but one January I made a trip out there by superjeep across a completely monochrome landscape, where there was no difference between the land and the sky, in order to bathe in a hot spring that pours out from a 500-year-old lava field. It was a long drive and several times we thought we weren’t going to get through the snow, so we had to drive through rivers (which have nice gritty gravelly bottoms) or take a run-up at mushy snow but where we got really bogged down was right at the end, within sight of the hot spring. It’s not an adventure I see offered often these days so I’m glad I got to do it while there was an opportunity. As a student living in Switzerland, you might think I’d have had a go at skiing. Nope! Honestly never crossed my mind. But the triplets invested in a sledge (blue plastic disc) and we took the funicular up behind the city and spent a lot of time sliding down the hill next to the station on it. Keeping up the “what can you do in the snow apart from ski?” theme, here’s me falling over on snowshoes for two solid hours in Arctic Sweden twelve years ago. Turns out sometimes it’s worth trying again because three years later (and last month) I had no trouble.

About Julie

I’m a blogger, adventurer, lover of hot water, amateur paddler and polar bear who wilts in hot weather.

Time (by day, I’m a researcher) and funds keep me within Europe and I make regular trips up to the north, especially to Iceland. I like the occasional adventure across Europe by train and I’m starting to make use of my weekends for 48-hour adventures.

This isn’t my only creative outlet – I’ve written two travelogues with a third and fourth being (not to much) written simultaneously right now.

Blog at WordPress.com.
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