I was browsing through the stacks and stacks of esoteric stuff at the Ann Arbor Model Railroad Show in Saline on Sunday when I came across something strange.

Well, strange for that place, anyway; most of the stuff at the show would be strange to most people, but at least familiar to the model railroading enthusiasts wandering around.

The strange item I found was a book, named North Country Trail Caches, marked "Display copy." Now, readers that have been around for a while know that I once was very active in the development of the North Country Trail; in fact, while I had not actually seen the book before I had seen page proofs on a couple of pages in which I'm featured.

Now, I thought it was strange indeed to see this book at a model train show! Why would it be here? OK, so I'm dumb sometimes -- it was on sale; could the author, an old friend named Joan Young be there? While I hadn't seen Joan in some years, I hadn't known she was into model train stuff, too -- but then, I wasn't at the time I knew her, so big deal.

Sure enough, in a few minutes I heard a familiar voice: "Can I help you?"

"Yes," I smiled. "I'm looking for you."

"Do I know you?" Joan frowned.

"Think real hard," I grinned.

All of a sudden it struck her. She cried, "Wes!" and the next thing I knew we were in a big hug.

OK, so we've both changed -- it's probably been ten years, after all. I won't go into the details, except that we had a really fine half hour rediscovering each other, catching up on old friends and adventures, and admitting our interest in the subject of the show, going into some details about that. It seems that model railroading was a long time interest of hers, and she was at the show helping out a friend with her sales. They figured that as long as she was there they might as well have her book on sale.

After a while, I went home, watched the Daytona 500, and then while I pawed through the stuff I'd bought at the show, I flipped on a videotape of some shows I'd taped the day before about a model rocketeer meet in Kansas.

I don't want to say these folks were crazy, but everybody has their own idea of fun. These weren't little tiddlers, either -- some of them had thousands of pounds of thrust, altitude ranging up to 30,000 feet, speeds up to Mach 2 -- and all built in people's garages or whatever. There has to be a peculiar fun involved in watching a rocket you built blow through $5000 in rocket fuel in four seconds.

Let's face it, if you touch off 5000 pounds of thrust under a device that weighs maybe two hundred pounds, it's going to go up, well, like a rocket. That's fast fun, no matter how you cut it.

The people at this meet were having their fun shooting off these things. They had a number of contests, like seeing how high you could shoot a 16-lb bowling ball, how fast you could build a rocket from scratch, and things like that. Everybody seemed to be having a great time, a real adventure, a real diversion.

Over the years I've gone through a number of perhaps slightly offbeat hobbies, and sometimes have invested a lot of time and money in them. They all share one thing in common -- they're all fun diversions, ways to exercise the mind, and sometimes the body, ways to do something to have fun, rather than just sit in front of the TV and let your brain be spoon fed.

I'm not alone -- there are a lot of people out there that have many divergent interests, some truly odd. I'm sure all of us can think of someone we know that has a truly odd hobby. In fact, I would have to go so far as to say that in general, people with interests and enthusiasms about things are more interesting than people who don't bother with them.

Let's face it -- there are watchers in this life, and there are doers -- people that want to do things to experience them, not just find out about them by watching them on TV. Yeah, so I spent a few hours Sunday watching the Daytona 500 (well, let's be honest, sleeping through all but the last 50 laps or so, which is usually the best way to watch NASCAR). It can be fun and exciting to watch -- but given a choice, I'd rather experience the feeling of hot lapping Daytona at even three quarters of the speed of those rocket sleds.

Or, speaking of rockets, while I think my long term interest in the subject would be limited, it would be fun to fire off one of those things once. Or build a trebuchet, or learn scuba diving, or lots of things, most of which I'll never get to do. Building a model railroad is just the latest thing on a long list of things to do for me. I for one hope I always will have something else to learn about.
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