Well, having said that local walks don’t inspire me, curiosity took over today. I wanted to see what’s happened with the flood around the creek and down in Mon (although I had no intentions to actually walk into the area where I had my accident with the ice!). When I got to the creek it was obvious that the water had risen dramatically. It now almost reaches the bridge, I’m trying to remember how much air there was under the bridge in the summer, about 1.5 m probably. When I got to the fields just before Mon, I found that the whole question of whether or not go into Mon was purely academic because the small road where it goes between the fields was completely flooded. I then checked out if that ”road to nowhere” I found in December was available, and the answer is… sort of. It is used as a snowmobile trail, but right where the trail goes into the forest, it goes over a flooded ditch. Water had flown over the ice and then frozen, so it’s probably just one huge block of ice, strong enough to carry the snowmobiles. But it didn’t matter how much I tried to tell myself that it’s solid ice, my body just wouldn’t move. If you like to bet, you would have betters odds at betting on a snowball in hell, than me going over that ditch. It just wasn’t happening.

So I have a problem. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, trying to figure out if I’m just scared of ice or if I have a genuine phobia. The fact that I can’t use logic to beat the fear indicates that it’s more than a scare, but at the same time, I have no trouble with the idea of following somebody else going over the ice. I just need visible proof that the ice holds, so it’s really my own logic that I’ve lost faith in. Because after all, I was using logic when I had my accident or I wouldn’t have walked on that ice to start with!

* * *

That trip to Iceland that I mentioned a while back, it’s not happening. A real shame because I had already decided that I would do it, but they had to cancel it because not enough people had booked it. So now they’re planning it for 2014 instead, to give people more time to think about it (and save money to pay for it…) and plan their vacations. I’ve pre-pre-booked myself for that 2014 trip, but it means that now I need to come up with something for 2013 because I really have to do something. I don’t have to necessarily travel abroad, but I just need to do something new. My best plan so far is to push myself out of my comfort zone, which doesn’t actually require much. I mean that my comfort zone is such a comfortable place that simple things like staying up until midnight to make use of the long sunsets in the summer, and camping out in the mountains, would already take me out of there. I haven’t done such basic things, and I call myself nature photographer? Pathetic. So I’m thinking about doing that along the Wilderness Road that I drove in 2009 and been planning to re-visit ever since. 2013 is the year it will happen!