Where have all the hobbies gone???

After a day of surfing Saturday, I spent Sunday with my Dad and Vicki going to a hobby train show in Santa Clara.  Ever since I was little my mom and dad both instilled in my brother and I that a true hobby is so important in life.  Hence, me with horses and my brother with airplanes.

We were discussing over the weekend though how incredible it is that there were actually kids at this train show and a good handful of them.  It seems in the past 5-10 years, the amount of kids having hobbies of this kind have dropped drastically with the evolving of the internet.  Don’t get me wrong, I blog, I have a facebook, I tweet, but I also never take getting outside for granted.  Growing up, we didn’t come inside until the sun went down.  I’d be roller blading in the circle with my friends or out at the barn until I was forced home.  Same with my brother, he spent many hours just washing airplanes so that he could learn about them before he was old enough to fly them.  For this, I’m so thankful to my parents for instilling hard working hobbies that require a lot of responsibility as well.  On weekends, we were skiing or biking or just spending time outdoors together making road trips to places we’d never seen. I can’t tell you one tv show I loved as a kid.  I’m sure I watched but I wasn’t always waiting for it to come on the tv.  I know the internet is a great thing but I really do wish that more families put the effort into showing their kids the real world outside of the internet and tv.  This train show we went to over the weekend though gave me hope that more kids are interested in actually working on a greater hobby.

My dad’s hobby has always been train collections (as well as real life size trains) and ever since I can remember, we would go to these collectable train meets. He builds large lay outs and works on the machinery he has.  There is really only about one train show a year now, where there used to be 4 or 5.  The train venders are very smart and also carry other interesting pieces besides just trains to keep people’s eyes moving and offer more than just for the train lover. Anyways, enough of my rambling and here are the photos I took.  Enjoy!

Kids!

Train lay outs.

Of course I liked the one with the horses on the lay out.

There was an entire lay out made out of legos.  King Kong of legos.

Really cool bird houses.

Vicki perusing.

The smallest attention to detail!

So many handcrafted things.

Vintage lanterns.  These are so awesome!

Hand made by thin sliced wood.

Layered slivers.

So cute.

Oh wouldn’t you know there was a cute San Francisco setting 🙂

They came out with an awesome lantern and bird house!

There was an artist at this show that did these amazing 3-D pieces of art that I will feature later in the week.  They are wall pieces that are so incredibly detailed and look different from every angle.

What are your hobbies?