My wife and I just arrived home from Nelson, BC. We drove, it’s about 8 hours driving time, not including charging time for our electric vehicle. It makes for a long day. In Nelson, we met some great friends, had some delicious food, and we also had some wonderful time together before she starts back at school next week and I start my retirement off with 5 of the next 7 weeks away from home.

Nelson is a really quaint and inviting city to visit, but I could never live there. The mountains are too close for me. The local hills look more like walls than hills. It’s odd to look out a window and see what looks like a vertical wall of trees. But that’s not what really makes me feel walled in, what does this to me is the prolonged dusk time.

Dusk has always been a time that I feel sleepy. This wasn’t a problem when I lived in Barbados. There, the sun hits the horizon over water and fifteen minutes later it’s dark. In Nelson dusk lasts for hours. The sun goes behind the mountains, the light gets muted and it stays like that until the sun finally sets below an unseen horizon.

And that whole time I feel tired, my eyes feel weaker, and I don’t want to do anything. It’s funny because I’m sitting in my back patio at home in the Vancouver lower mainland at dusk right now, and I can honestly say it’s not as bad as Nelson. I think it’s a combination of the length of time for dusk there and an added darkness from the mountain walls that make it more challenging there… well, more challenging for me anyway.

Again, Nelson is a wonderful city, But I think I need a horizon line that is a little lower than Nelson has to offer. It’s a city that, for me, conveys the sentiment, ‘A great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there’. I’d just feel too walled in.