Are those pastures really greener?

There's something intrinsically absurd about the human characteristic to think 'distance equals better'.

Or as the old saying sort of goes, that pastures are greener over the fence. Might make sense if you are a cow or a sheep, with limited reasoning skills ...

As a kid I went fishing a lot with my dad. It didn't occur to me then (hey, dad was always right until you turn 12!) but now I look back in awe at the process.

We'd load the boat up on a trailer, and all our fishing gear into the truck, and drive no less than 90 minutes (sometimes more than 2-3 hours) to a lake that was just magically known to have the most fish.

We lived about 10 minutes from a lake that was also fish-laden. But if you have a whole bunch of gear and a boat on a trailer and a nice big truck with which to lade with expensive fishing gear, lugging it all just 10 minutes away to the lake near you seems to defeat the purpose of owning a buttload of gear. Or fishing. Or something.

And away we'd go, driving to the distant lake. We'd pass guys with trucks loaded to the gunwhales with fishing gear, and boats on trailers, driving towards our lake. Clearly these guys must be nuts. The fools! The lake we were heading to was clearly far better.

Why?

It was further away from us. To the not-so-calculating human mind, distance travelled seems to equal an enhanced fishing/shopping experience.

A mate of mine from Vancouver liked to buy two things on a fairly regular basis: a new mountain bike, and new ski gear. He spent up large on the ski gear every single year.

Never mind that his annual ski-gear-purchasing was a deeply disturbing psychosis  – after only having skied perhaps 6 or 7 times on said gear, he'd deem it all "worn out" at the end of the season, and another big spend-up was required for the new season (but that's a whole other crazy Blog topic). He had to travel a good distance out of the city, past several ski-gear shops near his apartment, to get this gear.

One day I asked him why, when I learned that the stuff he bought was the same brand and the same price as the stores just down the street. He couldn't come up with a sane answer.

He did the same thing with his mountain bikes. There had to be 19 stores within walking distance of his apartment. But no – he went miles out of the city to this one shop that had the best deals. Except, they didn't. Same bike, same price.

Another friend here in Welly seems convinced that buying stuff overseas results in better gear (or perhaps some sort of odd concept of a better shopping experience?) So things like hard drives and cameras and headphones and cell phones get mail-ordered.

Factor in the monetary exchange rate, and the time waiting for delivery. Is that an 'enhanced shopping experience'? For most sane guys, we once again hear Austin Powers' famous line: "How about NO, you crazy Dutch bastard!?"

(And I've since adopted another great line from Colin Farrell, in In Bruges – "Maybe I'd find it good if I grew up on a farm ... or if I was retarded. But I didn't, and I'm not.")

And uniquely, with my mail-order-zany friend, there is a high incidence of the equipment arriving, and soon meeting an untimely demise due to mysterious sessions of unpredictable mayhem  (dropping, throwing, knocking over, or drowning seem to be the most popular methods of rendering said gear inoperative). Occasionally there is a slim chance a warranty covers this self-inflicted gear-i-cide, but of course, said gear needs to be sent back (by mail) to the country of purchase.

But hey. It's better.

I often get a strong vision of my dad and I tooling along the highway, driving to that far-away lake ...