Shall I stay with my current company without a project and get paid for occasional travel and doing bs, or accept the Automation job near by?

I'd choose whichever paid more.

Your time must pass very slowly. Tbh, not working is more effort for me than actually working. Working brings positive energy

This is a pain management question.

Can you make the boring one fun by doing research? E.g. automating boring tasks for the operations team or the dev team?

Open source contributions are another enjoyable thing companies are happy to support given the projects are useful to them