How Do People Do It

I got a couple of free lift tickets for Red Mountain Resort from a friend so I drove down to Rossland and used one up today. It wasn't a bad day, fairly sunny, about 10 cm new snow in the past 24 hours (counts as a major dump in Rossland), no wind, and I paid for nothing but gas, so you'd think I could have a good day. But the tedium of it wore me down within a few hours.

It's unclear to me, as I never resort ski, whether all lifts are as slow as Red Mountain ski lifts. I am pretty sure I could have skinned up in only slightly longer, and, as skiing down is so fast, it seemed that before I knew it, I was back sitting on that chair again trying to avoid conversation with the person in the next seat who wanted to chew my ear off about everything that had happened to him that day, that week, that year. Long minutes of my life wasted on the chair, and, then, before I knew it, I'm back on that chair again, trapped like the proverbial rat in a trap.

After lunch, I stuck my MP3 player in my ears and listened to a talking book. This helped drown out both the tedium of my chair mate and the chair-lift ride.

So, my question is, how do people do this day after day, for fun? Unless you have the attention span of a gnat, it's just inexplicable. 

Where I would rather be