Alright, mostly I’ve been wearing what I call my snow boots (i.e. my warm cozy boots:) with microspikes, not my rubber boots, these days — because it is icy icy icy in Portland and it has been pretty damn comical trying to walk without extra traction.
.
(doug-fir needles with their like 2 extra inches of ice from a few different bouts of freezing rain, brr!!)
.
(I bought these a few years ago for winter hiking, but they have been very helpful for ice-walking this week!)
.
For realz, just try to walk on this shit without spikes:
(one of the many staircases at Mt. Tabor)
.
Anyway, point being, it has been very icy and slippery here, and since I am not biking anywhere I have been taking long, long microspiked walks to try to get out the stir-crazies.
But the other day (yesterday maybe? the day before?), there was a morning where it looked like things might actually thaw for a second, and it rained and rained, and all the ice started to melt. So for a while there, my surrounding streets started to calve off icebergs into the roadways.
.
(so damn dreary and gross, ha)
.
And THEN my brand-new insulated rubber boots, boots that I just bought a few weeks ago after not having real rubber boots for many many years despite living in a very wet place, THEN my boots really shone:) I had to still be very careful, since it was still super slippery (I may have fallen on my ass a few times, oops), but OMG IT WAS SO MUCH FUN TO SPLASH AROUND LIKE A FIVE-YEAR-OLD feeling invincible in my boots.
.
(you can’t get me, freezing water! I’ve got rubber boots!!:)
.
So, my rubber boot walk definitely covered less distance than my microspike walks have been covering since it was slow going with all the ice still, but it was probably much more purely delightful because of all the splashing around in the icebergs:)
So this is just an ode to rubber boots and the childlike joy they bring me <3
After I went splashing around everything froze again, so today it’s been back to microspikes only. But it seems like it’s thawing again (maybe?), so maybe tomorrow will be another rubber boot day!! Splish splash sploosh!! :)