[Thursday, 28 March]
There’s not much to say about the road home. I left in snow, which mostly turned to light rain by the time I got to Mt. Robson, just 45 minutes west. I picked up a bit more snow south of Valemount on the Albreda Pass, but this was also light and didn’t stick to the road. Beyond that, I drove in rain for much of the way on the Yellowhead south to Kamloops, with bright sunshine emerging in the last hour or so.
After Kamloops I decided to detour west through the Fraser Canyon on the Trans-Canada highway. Got some video of the road, but didn’t have much time for stops. There’s a lot to see there and a lot of construction still ongoing after the floods and fires of recent years. But that will have to be another trip.
Some repeated thoughts
My five nights in the hostel were wonderful. Made new friends, or at least travel acquaintances. Enjoyed meals and a long hike with them, and lots of conversation. The conversation, despite some language issues, was the most fun part. I wrote a few years ago that encountering people from different places and backgrounds was the best part of travel, and that it wasn’t really possible to do that in the U.S. That’s still true.
But beyond that, the quality of the conversation was different, and more enjoyable. I don’t think work came up once, except possibly incidentally (“What made you move to Seattle?” or some such). We didn’t discuss “stuff” much at all except maybe for my comments about the micro-spikes that made my hikes so much better, and one German woman’s comment that my car — despite its age — seemed like the only one she had been in during her stay that would pass German inspection. (Yes, I mostly maintain it myself.)
In the U.S. I can’t sit on a plane for five minutes without somebody bringing up work or asking about it. Why would you think that’s my focus once the workday is done? I just don’t get it. I’m not sure who the woman in this video is, but Instagram served her up to me, and she does seem to get where I’m coming from:
I often enjoy the simple pleasure of just having somebody else there and sharing the experience. I got to do that on this trip. Watching the video of my hike at Mt. Robson, you wouldn’t know there was a second person there, unless you really got hung up on the times I said “we” instead of “I.” In part it’s because she didn’t want to be in the video, but in part because we weren’t talking much. It was nice to share the presence of another human being without needing to vocalize every thought.
Beyond conversation, or lack thereof, the people I met didn’t seem focused on “optimizing” everything about their lives or at least not their travels. I like traveling with a block of time and minimal plans and the people I met were of like mind. When one of them chose to join me for the hike and the other decided not to, there was no sense of great regret, or the expectation that she had something else to do. She spent that day going for a local walk. They missed a lot of the “must sees” and didn’t seem to care. I did too, and felt the same way.
Before I left, I had an argument with a now-former friend who essentially told me I was wasting my trip if I didn’t plan every minute and ensure that I hit every attraction I could. She suggested some online apps and AI-infused tools to “optimize” my time so not a moment was “wasted,” as if sitting in the sun and enjoying my tea while looking out at an icy lake was somehow time wasted. I told her that she’d been brainwashed by consumerism run amok. I stand by that assertion.
The notion that vacation was for relaxing was lost on that former friend. One of the people I met on this trip wondered why I made an advance decision about the next day’s hike. “Why not wait until morning to see what the weather is?” she asked with typically German straightforwardness. She was right. I planned day-to-day at most, and was happier for it.
[Aside, I really enjoy meeting and chatting with Germans. Somebody once described German culture as the most autistic culture on the planet. I don’t think that’s fair to either autism or Germans, but I do love the straightforwardness and the reduced need to try to figure out what somebody really means that I enjoy when speaking with them. When a German woman once asked if she could stay in my room overnight due to a change of plans, I didn’t feel compelled to wonder what her intentions were as I might have with somebody else. I could move directly to the real problem of how to make space for her sleeping bag.]
It’s not the first time I have felt this way recently. I ended up on my own for the same reasons during the RAT Raid in Nelson last summer. Really, every time I’ve been in Nelson. Weekends away with a friend have been like that. I’ve found myself backing away from other travels, even those involving close friends, when it seems like the people involved want it to be a series of planned events. It’s not how I choose to experience the world outside of work.
All this was out of the U.S. (Despite the similarities, Canada is subtly different in many ways), and all the people involved were from outside North America. As was true when I first penned similar thoughts 7 years ago, I think there’s a clear lesson I should keep in mind.
So I’m back to where I was when I came back from that New Zealand trip a few years back. It’s taken many months since I left my job to get to the point that I can actually relax and let the bullshit go, and as I move back to the working world in the coming months, I’m determined not to let go of that occasional feeling.