Boredom

7/27/2017

You know, when you live a very exciting life and have a lot of exciting adventures, it can sometimes be nice to have a day where you’re just bored. It’s almost a relief when lethargy born only of a truly mind-numbingly boring day slips over you, dulling your mind and turning the world kind of gray.

Wait – or did the world itself actually just turn gray?

Yes, it appears that it did.

How did this happen? Well, I started the day off well enough, entering British Columbia (BC), which advertised itself as “the best place on Earth”. And it certainly seemed very nice, with lovely soaring mountains and snow and forests and all the things I’ve grown accustomed to seeing here in this part of Canada.

But then, slowly, I saw less and less. It’s not that the mountains weren’t there – oh no, they were there, I just couldn’t see them. It turns out that the majority of the western half of Canada is on fire right now. While I had experienced some haze in Banff and Jasper, it hadn’t been that atrocious. But as soon as I got into the western reaches of the mountain range, the smoke descended and clung to the landscape like a heavy woolen blanket, stifling and hot. It was truly awful. I contemplated going back to Jasper and then heading south to Glacier, fleeing the haze, but it then occurred to me that I wouldn’t get to see Washington that way and that would just be awful too. So I headed west towards Kamloops, a relatively quick drive that was so incredibly boring that I may have actually lost some brain cells. I’m told that the route down the Coquihalla Highway is actually fairly scenic, but I wouldn’t know because the haze obscured everything more than 100 feet away from the road, and my world was just nothing but gray.

This mountain would probably be quite scenic... if I could see it.

At least the signs are kind of exciting here. I like the emphasis so you know that you're really really supposed to go 80.

I pulled into Kamloops sometime late in the afternoon to find the city swarming with evacuees from the fires. I wandered around a while checking the town out, and saw that most of the restaurants and other venues in the city had discounts for the evacuees, which I’m sure at least helped ease their discomfort at being forcibly ousted from their homes. Multiple people mistook me for a fellow evacuee, so I guess maybe I looked a little bedraggled and off-kilter as well. Or maybe because I had spent the day going gradually further into a gray world, and was kind of feeling a bit dull.

So there you have it, a short post for a truly unremarkable, boring, gray day. I’ll be happy to get back to the adventuring soon now that I’ve had a day to remember how awful it is to be bored!