Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, they say. I’m not quite sure who ‘they’ are, but they give good advice. What I love to do is write and, while I’ve been doing that for a decade now, it definitely feels like work a lot of the time. I guess that’s down to the things I’m writing about on a daily basis.

But I also love to travel and, because journalism is not just a nine to five, Monday to Friday job, but a 24/7 vocation, packing up and travelling the world is just not an option. So I travel in quick spurts, with specific plans and, while I’ve been all over the world, there are certain places that call to me, namely the poles and mostly the Arctic, though Antarctica is on my radar for the near future.

I’ve always wanted to start a travel blog but I never really had a specific niche until December 2019 when I sat in a snowsuit in Northern Sweden, soaking up the cold in the depths of the polar night.

I had fallen in love with the Arctic. Hot temperatures were never for me and I tend to hide away from the sun. But put me in sub-zero temperatures and bulk me up with layers of warm clothing and I’m in my element. Throw in a unique experience like dog sledding or ice climbing or cuddling a wolf and I’m in Heaven.

I had often attempted to write a travel blog in the past. Top tips for this. How to do that. Why you should go here, there and everywhere. But I found it all so boring and it involved so much research to ensure I had all the right information, with very little personal touch. That kind of boredom resulted in a lack of motivation, which left Travel Polar completely on the shelf.

But it struck me, almost a year after John (more on him further down the page) and I discussed this brand new venture, that what I really wanted to write about was our own story: the time we got locked into a zoo in northern Norway during heavy snowfall; the night we spent running around Stockholm because I’d lost my phone; how we came to visit Svalbard and what made me dream up the idea to go there in the first place.

Together we have visited so many places, learned about different cultures and had the most incredible experiences, all of which are treasured memories in digital photo albums or physical photo books.