If you have thought about leaving the hobby...

[hbelkins]

There's one long-time roadgeek (and member of this forum) who recently announced he was giving up his websites because of a shift in life priorities. Marriage and a young child will do that to you, I guess.

That's the kind of answers I was hoping to see in this thread.

[CanesFan27]

<out of lurk mode> HB I think you are putting way too much drama and worry into this.  Just because someone, like myself, doesn't have time to post websites, blogs, go to every single roadmeet imaginable, etc etc. doesn't make that I - or others - are leaving the hobby.

I think you way overthink and dramatize these things.  You can't go to roadmeet - yes we get it - every single roadmeet thread you post about how you can't go. 

A coworker of mine 12-13 years ago who loves boating and building model boats that fit inside glass bottles told me, Interest in hobbies ebb and flow. You do a lot for a few weeks months or years then it gets put aside and then you get back to it when you have more time. That why it's a hobby.

As for my websites it was fun and I enjoyed it. But its time has passed.  I have other things to do and just said hey I don't need these things in the house any more. And being able to start new adventures with my son and family is what I prefer to do more than anything else.  And other interests kicked in.  But again that is why it's a hobby.

So why don't you take the break you're bellyaching about - you may enjoy it.

<return to lurk mode>

[formulanone]

I've also shut down my website, since I'd put most of my best shots on Flickr. I'm so backlogged that I figured I shouldn't pay for hosting anymore. Financially, there's just other priorities and paying for web space I rarely find time to use ranks somewhere around 238th on the list, what with so many good-and-free alternatives now.

Sorry for all the empty IMG tags.

[cjk374]

I was in to model railroading for several years. I had a small layout with many cars and locomotives. But then "hurricane Daniel" hit my layout...twice! (Daniel is my now 16 year old son who was 3 when he wrecked my layout.) So I put it all away and got a job with a real railroad.

I will get another layout put up one day. But for now I will enjoy my job and when the time is right I'll get a new layout and enjoy the hobby again.

I'll always find time to enjoy the road. There are still way too many new places to see and explore.

[corco]

<out of lurk mode> HB I think you are putting way too much drama and worry into this.  Just because someone, like myself, doesn't have time to post websites, blogs, go to every single roadmeet imaginable, etc etc. doesn't make that I - or others - are leaving the hobby.

I think you way overthink and dramatize these things.  You can't go to roadmeet - yes we get it - every single roadmeet thread you post about how you can't go. 

A coworker of mine 12-13 years ago who loves boating and building model boats that fit inside glass bottles told me, Interest in hobbies ebb and flow. You do a lot for a few weeks months or years then it gets put aside and then you get back to it when you have more time. That why it's a hobby.

As for my websites it was fun and I enjoyed it. But its time has passed.  I have other things to do and just said hey I don't need these things in the house any more. And being able to start new adventures with my son and family is what I prefer to do more than anything else.  And other interests kicked in.  But again that is why it's a hobby.

So why don't you take the break you're bellyaching about - you may enjoy it.

<return to lurk mode>

Honestly, I hope I get bored of the hobby one day. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but odds are that if I get bored of it it's because I'm growing as a person and other more important things are taking over. The day I wake up and don't give a shit about roads anymore will be a bittersweet day, but ultimately a good sign of personal growth and progression.

[US 41]

I have never thought about leaving the hobby. Time and money is a big thing I lack however. Plus the if I break down how much will this cost me aspect. There's a reason I haven't went to Mexico yet. It's not necessarily money (well it is a little bit), but mostly it's the time aspect. I've found 10 days to be able to go to Canada (going there Sunday actually) and Washington D.C. However driving 1950 miles to the Pacific Coast takes longer. Plus you can drive 12 hours easily enough the first day of the trip, but after that you start to wear down. I have not been able to find the 2 and a half weeks to take a drive to Mazatlan. However it doesn't mean you aren't still a road geek just because you can't find the time (or money). I can literally drive to any major city in the US, Canada, and Mexico without a map. I practically have had the road atlas memorized since I was like 7 years old. I don't think I will ever be able to leave the hobby. On Scribble Maps I have highlighted every highway I've ever driven on. I'll post it on here sometime.

[DaBigE]

Like others have said, hobbies ebb and flow. I hadn't built a LEGO model in over a decade, then I got back into them a couple years ago. While my LEGO interests were on hiatus, die cast interests filled the void. Now I am losing interest in die cast. When I was in elementary and middle school, I was interested in model trains, but that one got too expensive and space-prohibitive. Maybe that one will come back when I buy a house, maybe it won't.

I do feel my roadgeeking is scaling back (not that it was ever nearly as large as some of the other members). Gas is expensive. There are MANY areas of my home state I still haven't seen yet before I would consider taking an out-of-state road trip (unless it was for work). I've also gotten lazy in my road photography, as it takes time to sort and organize all the photos. Family life will be taking a growing portion of my time, with a wedding looming in the distance as well as aging family members I want to spend time with before it's too late. The fiancée is already talking about when to start a family   and we all know how much time small kids take up. As long as my job is in traffic engineering, the roadgeek will always be there. The rest of life's activities will determine how often it will take priority.

[Duke87]

When I stopped collecting baseball cards for a few years in college, lack of money to purchase them with was one motivating factor. Constantly being away from home (in a dorm) and thus not having regular access to my collection was another.

I've never taken a significant hiatus from roadgeeking but if I ever do I imagine family obligations will be the most likely cause. That said, my girlfriend enjoys going on road trips, so she alone is only encouraging me to continue.

[J N Winkler]

I take roadtrips and I collect traffic sign drawings.  My interest in and capacity for both have fluctuated over the years.

For about a decade I rarely roadtripped except for long vacations, because I spent most of the year in a country where it made little sense to own a car.  Now that I once again have easy access to a car for spur-of-the-moment roadtrips, I find I am less willing to compromise sleep, nutrition, and comfort for even a small-bore journey than I was back in the nineties.  I went on the road for three weeks in September 2014 and developed a very bad cold (the only one I have had in the last two years) immediately after I returned, and subsequently had a lot of trouble in the gym catching up to where I had been before I left.  This was a wake-up call.

I enjoyed the trip I took to Colorado in late May/early June for the gathering in Denver, but my fiber intake dropped sharply while it was in progress, and it took about two days after I returned for my digestion to recover.  Since then I have been toying with some ideas for day or overnight trips that would involve less planning overhead and schedule disruption, but I have not actually acted on any of them since it has been unpleasantly hot the past few weeks and I have had other obligations to clear first.

I have a small and light car, so the cost of fuel is normally less of a concern for me than it is for others with larger vehicles.  But when I was planning my September 2014 trip gas was around $4/gallon, so I went to considerable lengths to do the repairs (including replacement of coolant temperature sensor and thermostat) that were necessary to push my car over the 30 MPG barrier.  I succeeded, and the rough 3-5 MPG gain over 6750 miles more than covered the cost of the parts and my time at minimum wage (a fair valuation considering my skill level).  However, that also catapulted me back into DIY car repair, a hobby I had more or less abandoned at the end of the nineties.  I do want to take full advantage of the fact that gasoline is currently under $3/gallon, but I foresee that repairs and maintenance will cut into roadtripping time to some degree since I am now tending three cars.

State DOT remote sensing assets like photologging are now online to a degree almost unimaginable 15 years ago, so there is less of an incentive to drive down a state highway just to see what it looks like.  I find I am more concerned about the quality of the driving experience than I used to be--I want it to be smooth and fluid, in a car that fits me like a glove.  I avoid endurance runs these days (indeed, I see them as a symptom of poor planning), and I don't use a camera behind the wheel because it ruins vehicle sympathy.  I have considered videotaping my drives, but have reservations about a suction-mounted camera in my cone of visibility as well as the archiving and processing burden of the resulting footage.

I have been collecting traffic sign drawings since early 2002.  The time commitment expanded steadily as more and more state DOTs started putting construction plans online, but in the past four years it has gone down radically as I have written scripts to automate plan acquisition and extraction of signing sheets.  I now have a script launcher that manages 47 scripts to handle plan acquisition, each script running daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly; most run every Monday night.  There are about five other scripts that I hand-launch as needed.  However, I have had far less success automating extraction of signing sheets.  The scripts I have written work largely by increasing the number of plans sets I can hand-process per hour, but do nothing about the scarcity of my eyeball time.

When I started in 2002, TxDOT was essentially the only agency that was putting good-looking pattern-accurate signing plans online in any considerable quantity, and a TxDOT signing contract was something to look forward to.  Now, in 2015, I would kind of like my Monday evenings back, and the mountain of signing plans is so high (probably more than 70,000 at this point) that I can't realistically imagine myself looking at any given sheet of signing a second time after I extract it.  I used to see the states for which contract signing was a very infrequent event (CT and DE come to mind) as problem children, because it meant I spent time marking contract after contract as having no signing.  Now I am beginning to realize that the states with a lot of contract signing are even more troublesome, since it takes time to mark up the signing sheets in each contract that has them.

When I was scripting plan acquisition, I focused first on state DOTs in the US before moving on to foreign agencies.  I have had a standing intention for a year now to script contract downloading for the national highway authorities in France, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden, but have made no progress, because I have been unwilling to allocate the time it would take to process downloads from them.

I am not sure where I will go forward from this point.  I agree with Corco that moving away from a given pursuit, once it fails to turn up fresh nuggets of personal enrichment, is often a sign of growth and learning.  But I also think that roadgeeks are perhaps more susceptible than others to the neurosis of conscientious completion--must clinch all the state highways in State X, must collect all the counties in State Y, and so on.  I know I suffer from this problem, especially in regard to the traffic sign drawings collection, and the only relatively painless way I have found for dealing with it is to work my way around to a clean and clearly documented exit.

[Pete from Boston]

I don't stop and photograph nearly as much as I once did, since I now usually do so with someone else's time as well as my own, and I have to weigh the diplomatic cost of cashing in bits of her patience to go back an exit to shoot a sign. 

[skaguy]

I had been pretty full bore until a road trip to Clarksburg, WV about a month ago.  We had a bad hotel experience and it was not a cheap hotel either.  Also, the lack of food options when traveling especially to more obscure places can be challenging.  We were in Kilmarnock, VA last weekend and the found this McDonald's that was nothing short of terrible.  There was nothing for another 45 minutes back to the west and we needed to stop. 

I've traveled a lot on the Plains and never had issues, but we were outside of Richmond, VA last year off of I-64 and stopped at Pilot about 10 PM.  I don't consider it terribly late and never thought twice about it.  However, I was met by a couple shady guys in the restroom and one was apparently trying to hold the door shut.  I was at first oblivious to the situation and while I'm not sure what was going on, it was certainly shady.

In general, I float between different hobbies.  I recently purchased a new camera and my girlfriend has a vehicle which gets driven less than 1,000 miles a year if I don't drive it, so it's a perfect combination to go exploring.  I've also been in NOVA a couple years and there's still tons of unchartered territory up here for me.

[Rothman]

I haven't been to a meet in years, but I've never considered myself as having given up the hobby.  Come to think of it, quitting the hobby would be like losing an interest and that's something that must be just outright hard to do altogether.

[Laura]

Ebbs and flows in hobbies are a normal thing. This is my first post here in almost 3 months, but that doesn't mean I stopped liking roads during that time. I just needed a break from the forum during the last month of the semester, and then got caught up in life for a bit after that. After my semester ended, Mike and I went on a much needed trip to WV and Western MD. There were plenty of roads to be had, plus a spontaneous meetup with CPZ out there.

I used to go on chat many evenings a week. I loved chat and still do, but haven't had the chance to go in for months. Different priorities have come up for my late evenings (sleep, time with Mike, thesis work), and that's okay. Sometimes we have to set healthy boundaries for ourselves because there just isn't enough time to do it all.

I've started a new internship with MDOT in transit planning with MTA, so my interests as of late have shifted a bit into the transit side. It's amazing and it's the best job ever because it doesn't feel like work at all. However, it also means my role commenting on transit groups on facebook has changed. I definitely can't comment on what I am directly working on because it could cost me my job. I can't publicly comment on the actions of politicians involving transportation, either. My interest is as intense as ever - I'm trying to figure out how I can clinch as many of the local bus lines as possible within the next year - but it means my role in the community aspect is different.

This next year is going to be a very busy one for me - I'll be working at my internship and finishing school, with the goal of graduating on May 21, 2016. My absence doesn't mean I've left the hobby, it just means that there are other priorities on the plate for now. I don't think I could ever truly leave, to be honest - roads will always be a part of me. But my role in the hobby and the role it has on me will certainly change as I progress through life.

[SSOWorld]

split Freedom of Information discussion - see https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=15991 - --sso

[cjk374]

Ebbs and flows in hobbies are a normal thing. This is my first post here in almost 3 months, but that doesn't mean I stopped liking roads during that time. I just needed a break from the forum during the last month of the semester, and then got caught up in life for a bit after that. After my semester ended, Mike and I went on a much needed trip to WV and Western MD. There were plenty of roads to be had, plus a spontaneous meetup with CPZ out there.

I used to go on chat many evenings a week. I loved chat and still do, but haven't had the chance to go in for months. Different priorities have come up for my late evenings (sleep, time with Mike, thesis work), and that's okay. Sometimes we have to set healthy boundaries for ourselves because there just isn't enough time to do it all.

I've started a new internship with MDOT in transit planning with MTA, so my interests as of late have shifted a bit into the transit side. It's amazing and it's the best job ever because it doesn't feel like work at all. However, it also means my role commenting on transit groups on facebook has changed. I definitely can't comment on what I am directly working on because it could cost me my job. I can't publicly comment on the actions of politicians involving transportation, either. My interest is as intense as ever - I'm trying to figure out how I can clinch as many of the local bus lines as possible within the next year - but it means my role in the community aspect is different.

This next year is going to be a very busy one for me - I'll be working at my internship and finishing school, with the goal of graduating on May 21, 2016. My absence doesn't mean I've left the hobby, it just means that there are other priorities on the plate for now. I don't think I could ever truly leave, to be honest - roads will always be a part of me. But my role in the hobby and the role it has on me will certainly change as I progress through life.

I wish you the very best of luck with your schooling. And congrats on that aweome internship with MTA!!   

[Zeffy]

Ebbs and flows in hobbies are a normal thing. This is my first post here in almost 3 months, but that doesn't mean I stopped liking roads during that time. I just needed a break from the forum during the last month of the semester, and then got caught up in life for a bit after that. After my semester ended, Mike and I went on a much needed trip to WV and Western MD. There were plenty of roads to be had, plus a spontaneous meetup with CPZ out there.

I used to go on chat many evenings a week. I loved chat and still do, but haven't had the chance to go in for months. Different priorities have come up for my late evenings (sleep, time with Mike, thesis work), and that's okay. Sometimes we have to set healthy boundaries for ourselves because there just isn't enough time to do it all.

I've started a new internship with MDOT in transit planning with MTA, so my interests as of late have shifted a bit into the transit side. It's amazing and it's the best job ever because it doesn't feel like work at all. However, it also means my role commenting on transit groups on facebook has changed. I definitely can't comment on what I am directly working on because it could cost me my job. I can't publicly comment on the actions of politicians involving transportation, either. My interest is as intense as ever - I'm trying to figure out how I can clinch as many of the local bus lines as possible within the next year - but it means my role in the community aspect is different.

This next year is going to be a very busy one for me - I'll be working at my internship and finishing school, with the goal of graduating on May 21, 2016. My absence doesn't mean I've left the hobby, it just means that there are other priorities on the plate for now. I don't think I could ever truly leave, to be honest - roads will always be a part of me. But my role in the hobby and the role it has on me will certainly change as I progress through life.

That sounds like an amazing experience. I hope you enjoy your job and make everyone proud. 

[Laura]

Aww, thank you Jess and Zeffy!!!