It's rainy today, so it seemed appropriate.

[cimorene]

 

top: Jacobson Women's Spot Wellies and Rose Wellies
bottom: Hunter Women's Original Gloss Short Wellies in Citrine and Unisex Festival 2010 Short Wellies in Ink

 

Comments

[brownbetty]

Honestly, this whole “Hey, we could put print on gumboots!” thing is the best innovation in gumboots in the last fifty years.

[cimorene]

I agree! My own are printed with a random collection of happy words that are possibly some kind of post-modern poetry. Although the main thing that actually owning a pair has taught me is to never wear them unless you have to actually go wading because they're really not very much fun to walk in.

[brownbetty]

Huh, well, gumboots aren't usually actually comfortable, but they oughtn't be un-comfortable.

[cimorene]

They're just a definite downgrade from shoes that are more closely fitted to your feet. I dislike all that extra space in them & the resultant clomping. Probably if I needed them for more heavy-duty activities, I would have them all outfitted with sculpted insole and polar fleece liners and then it wouldn't happen.

[isilya]

One of my most vivid memories from childhood is the thick, black, winter mud sucking off one of my gumboots. At which point I would have to arrest my forward motion and lurch awkwardly backwards to re-insert my foot into the boot, and then tear myself loose from the mud.

[cimorene]

Ahahahhaha! That's happened to me before too (hunting for fossils mostly, or camping), but as a child I didn't even have rubber boots, so it was a lot messier. I think we threw away a lot of canvas tennis shoes after encounters with the mud.

[isilya]

We had a motley collection of knee-high black rubber boots, and (this being Australia) we always had to turn them upside down and give them a good shake in order to dislodge potential lurking spiders. Because I was the youngest, I was always wearing rubber boots about ten sizes too large. I remember getting into a lot of trouble for venturing into the paddocks or stable-yard barefoot.

[cimorene]

Talking about rubber boots and stable yards is so amazzzzzzing to me because it is - you know, so British, which translates as 'the imaginary land of my childhood that I knew only through books and didn't quite realize was really real', much like Timbuktu or whatever.

[cimorene]

(I mean, obviously you have stable yards and rubber boots too. But I never read any books set in Australia and in American tv, the horse-intensive places are usually pretty dry and people seem to be wearing cowboy boots most of the time.)

[isilya]

I don't know if I've ever read a book set in Australia that mentions muddy rubber boots either! Of course for 90% of the year, the property was bone-dry. But in winter the cow yard in particular was just calf-deep thick sucking muck.

The classic line from Toy Story -- "THERE'S A SNAKE IN MUH BOOT!" -- always cracks me up because, well, once there was indeed a snake in my boot, though thank god I realised straight away from the extra weight and ditched it into the graden.

[cimorene]

I remember when we visited the Grand Canyon having to check sleeping bags and shoes for scorpions, but nobody in our (very large!) family camping group ever actually found one! I've seen snakes in the woods/wilderness of course, but never lived in a place where the wildlife (apart from raccoons... and possums) habitually ventured all the way up to the house. Probably why the Wild West stories are so exotic even to other Americans.

[pierydys]

I know that they aren't as pretty and fashionable as those cute pairs up above, but I'll always be a fan of Muck Boots (http://www.muckbootsonline.com/) from a pure comfort and reliability standpoint. My horseback riding teacher wore them and those things will keep you standing through a tsunami. Our stables were probably not as hardcore as Isilya's (nobody can beat Australians, man), but we still got our fair share of nasty, cold winter rain and can testify from firsthand experience that the muck and mud there was just as squelchy, smelly and disgusting ;-) Well, in the winter anyway. In the summer, there were nice clouds of dust, allergens and flies everywhere, when we weren't choking on ash clouds from late summer brush fires...

Oh hey, I just took a look at the rain boot section of that website I linked and they carry some stuff from partner companies that's pretty *and* have the fancy insoles/fleece liners/everything but the kitchen sink included. Nifty!

I used to wear waterproof snow boots to school during flood days (back when SoCal still had flood seasons) because the fuzzy lining was so much more comfortable than the cheap rubber rain boots. Then I acquired a pair of low fishing waders from one film project and ended up using those for particular wet location shoots for the next several years. Haven't ever really gotten around to getting a pair of proper rain boot yet, though I guess I'll have to soon enough since there's more weather up here. Know any good places or should I just shop online?

[cimorene]

Rainboots are pretty common, so in the season I think you should have no trouble finding them in your typical shoe stores, Anttila, or Prisma, that kind of place. Department stores will probably be a reliable source of the more upmarket brands of them. As far as I have discovered, there is not any good within-Finland online shoe store, but shipping from the rest of Europe (for places that ship internationally...) is sometimes reasonably cheap. Of course boots are a bit heavy so that will increase the shipping, though.