Mind Numbing Boredom

Whew, I’ve gotten pretty serious here lately.  It took me a while to write the Generation Gap post (including a couple of rewrites), so I’m going to go with something easy.  I haven’t shared a Troop 20 story in a while, so allow me to reminisce before I hit City Slickers (our service unit’s summer camp) next week.

Like I said in a post from last year, kids today have no idea how good they have it.  They have compact entertainment centers right at their fingertips.  We had nothing but our own imaginations.  Warped by mind numbing boredom.

Case in point:

In 1984, Troop 20 traveled to Washington DC for our annual trip.  Mrs. Vickers was deathly afraid of flying, so we took the train.  Oh boy!  The train!  I was super excited!  Later on, I found out that we would be riding it during the night to get to DC.  Oh well – it was still exciting though!

Then the actual train ride started.

I didn’t know that we would be stopping at every. single. stop. between Gainesville, GA and Washington DC.  Plus, we didn’t have sleeping quarters.  We sat in the coach section or whatever it’s called on a train.  We were not allowed to bring any additional items to entertain ourselves, because believe it or not, we had to haul our luggage with us everywhere for the day.  We weren’t checking into the Georgetown dorms until that night.  So the less we had to carry, the better.  But hey, we wouldn’t need anything because we were riding at night and we would be sleeping, right?

Right?

Well, there was this ultra bright light at the front of the car that stayed on all night.  Like ULTRA bright.  And we didn’t have pillows.  So you’d do that thing where you’d start to nod off and then suddenly your head would sag, which would startle you enough to wake up.  Then there was the baby in the back of the car.

I’ve heard varying stories about the baby*, but my dad and I remember it a certain way.  He was one of the chaperones.  We still joke about it to this day when we hear a crying baby.  There was a baby that would cry and cry and cry for what seemed like eternity.  He or she would finally settle down, but then we’d come to a stop at a station.  The baby would start up again.  Rinse and repeat.  Finally Mrs. Vickers had enough.  The next time the baby started crying, she yelled out, “FEED THAT BABY!”  I can still see her sitting in the seat with her arms crossed and toilet paper stuck behind her glasses trying to block out the ultra bright light at the front of the car.  We got tickled and tried holding it in so that we wouldn’t wake up the rest of the car, but this made us laugh even harder.  Finally we wiped the tears away from our eyes and continued to sit there while the train clacked on into the night.  Our boredom returned quickly.

Barbara noticed a long piece of string hanging off of one of the seats and snapped it off.  We started entertaining ourselves with this string by making different designs on the floor with it.   Finally, someone came up with the idea to stretch the string across the aisle, and we’d count how many people stepped on it as they walked by.

Let me repeat this.  We were so bored that we decided to take a piece of string, stretch it across the aisle, and keep a running tally of how many passengers stepped on it.  That is true boredom.  We actually became very excited when we’d see someone either get up from their seat or enter the car.  Would they step on it?  Or not?  The anticipation was too much to bear!  In the case where if it was too close to tell if they actually stepped on it or not, we’d have an in-depth discussion before deciding yay or nay.  We found more threads and strings and stretched them strategically across the aisle as well.  One man actually noticed the strings and purposely stepped over them.  We got a big kick out of that.

Kids today can watch a whole movie or two on something that’s smaller and thinner than a book.  They can also listen to thousands of songs on this same device.  Don’t forget the apps and games.

Us?  We counted the number of times people stepped on a piece of string.

I’ll write more about our Washington DC in a later blog post.  There have only been two times in my life that I’ve literally fallen asleep when my head hit the pillow.  One was after backpacking at National Center West, and the other time was this first night in DC after the overnight train ride and touring DC with our luggage in tow all day.  I’m sure the excitement of the string experiment added to the fatigue. 😉

*Jenny claims it was Caroline who yelled out, “FEED THAT BABY!”