One very popular hobby for many people is camping. I have gone camping many times throughout my life, in rain or snow, desert or forest. I have also camped on the banks of rivers, in snow caves, and in cabins. No matter where you go camping, your camping necessities may change a little, but the basics remain the same. You will need to stay warm. You will need shelter. You will need food to eat and a means to cook it.
The only places I have gone camping are in Utah, but there is such diversity in Utah's climate and landscape, that I experienced a variety of different camping experiences. A camping hobby is great in Utah and other outdoor states. As I boy scout, I used to go on the Klondike every year. This was a winter campout in the Utah Mountains. It would get freezing up there at night. A couple of times when I went, I slept in a tent. The tent was freezing. A nice sleeping bag kept me warm, but the air was too cold to breathe. By morning my lungs felt like they had sand in them. My scout leader, another scout, and I got up a little early to make a fire, because we were so cold. The scout kept complaining about how his feet hurt all morning, until the sun came up and then we realized he had his boots on the wrong feet. I think every year that I went to the Klondike, I fell through the ice on the lake and got wet. The warmest I have been at the Klondike was when I built a snow cave to live in. You just make a large pile of snow and pack it down. Then you dig out the inside large enough for a couple people to sleep in there. If you just have a candle, it will stay very warm inside the cave. The snow acts as insulation to the cold air outside. Snowcaving should definitely be added to your camping hobbies list.
I have camped in the high Uintah Mountains of Utah. My grandparents have a cabin up there that we have stayed in often. Now that I am older, I am a much bigger fan of cabin camping. You can just light the wood burning stove to keep the whole cabin warm. We had an electric generator to have electricity in the cabin. It might not sound much like camping to some people. We were up in the mountains alone though, and cooked our food on a campfire and got our water from a spring.
I have also camped in other areas of the High Uintah Mountains, without a cabin. Once I went on a fifty mile hike through the mountains. It took us five days going ten miles a day. We had to carry our tents, sleeping bags and all of the necessary supplies for food and other things, through the mountains for five days. Which reminds me; do not ever let your mom pack your backpack if you are going on a trip like that, unless you want to carry whole boxes of cereal and other things that are not useful on a long hike. When I hiked to King's Peak, the highest peak in Utah, my mom packed my backpack and once I got to our base camp, I found in my pack a large iron skillet to cook on that weighed a ton, a whole loaf of bread, a large jar of jelly and a large jar of peanut butter. To say the least, I was not a happy camper after I realized I had just lugged a cast iron frying pan up the mountain.
I have also camped in the deserts of Southern Utah. There is no end to the scenery and variety of landscape there, from arches to the Grand Canyon along with Goblin Valley to Lake Powell. There are also the large canyons with the Green River and the Colorado River carving through them. Find your camping gear at your online hobby store and more.
Peter Jay is the Owner/President and CEO of Variety Access – Your online hobby store and more. For more information about hobbies, hobby products, or Variety Access, go to www.VarietyAccess.com.


Favorite Hobbies - Yard Games
Yard games are a popular and simple hobby. Once you have a yard game, you can play it all you want for free, anywhere, anytime. You can go to the park with friends to play or just play in your backyard. There is no limit to a yard game hobby. Most yard games are simple and you can play them with your family, even children or with your friends. They can be a fun activity for everyone.

I have often played yard games as a hobby and even began selling them online. I manage the website for PlayCroquet.com, which is owned by Yard Game Central. At PlayCroquet and Yard Game Central, a variety of common and obscure yard games are sold from around the world. The games include, croquet, kubb, bocce ball, petanque, quoits, horseshoes, ladder golf and more. For many years growing up, my favorite yard game was croquet. This was because I had not played any others, however.
Now my favorite yard game is kubb. Kubb is a Swedish outdoor game. It has been around for centuries. Some people call it Viking chess. I do not know why though, because it is not anything like chess. The game works by lining up ten blocks of wood, kubbs; five on one end and five on the opposing end. A larger piece of wood, the king, is placed in the middle. There are two teams standing on the opposite sides. The teams take turns throwing sticks or batons at the kubbs on the opposing end. Whichever team knocks down all of the kubbs of the opposing team first and then knocks over the king, wins. If one team hits the king over before they have knocked over all of the kubbs, that team loses. The king is kind of like the eight ball in pool or billiards.
Horseshoes and bocce ball are some of my favorite hobbies or yard games as well. I kind of like those games or hobbies where you just throw things at something else. I played horseshoes a lot last summer. We used to just go at night to a horseshoe pit at the park and play in the dark. It was fun playing at night. There were some lights around, so you could see a little bit. You could usually just see a sparkle of light reflecting off of the pole in the horseshoe pit, and had to aim at the reflection. We got pretty good at it though.
Bocce ball is fun, because it is kind of relaxing. It does not take a lot of brain power. You just throw your ball at the main ball or at your opponents' balls and that's it. It is like an adult version of marbles. You can play it for hours. All you do is take the main ball, and throw it somewhere. Then you try to see who can get their ball the closest. Whichever team gets their ball the closest, gets a point. If they have several balls closer than any other of the opposing teams balls, then they get a point for each ball.
Croquet is another game I like. I have played croquet more than all of the others. It is the one that I grew up with. It takes a little more effort and strategy to play, and each player can play for themselves, up to six players, unlike the other games where there is two teams. I guess croquet can be played with two teams, but the version I have always played - poison croquet - is every man for himself. That is my favorite version of croquet though. Find a hobby today at your online hobby store and more.
Peter Jay is the Owner/President and CEO of Variety Access – Your online hobby store and more. For more information about hobbies, hobby products, or Variety Access, go to www.VarietyAccess.com.


Favorite Hobbies - River Rafting
One of my favorite hobbies is river rafting. I have always lived near a river or creek, and since I was a kid I loved to go tubing or rafting down the river. I think every kid loves to go tubing or rafting. I have gone many times, nearly every summer of my life. Usually I would just go on tubes. We could find tubes at a random tire repair shop. Often they just had inner tubes for sale that many of the kids in town would just go buy to go tubing. The creek was fine to tube on as a kid. It is not very large or fast, but felt like it was when I was younger. Now the creek by my house is kind of boring to tube, but there are bigger rivers around to raft and tube on also.
One river rafting trip I once went on lasted a week. We rafted down the green river in Utah for about seventy-five miles. It lasted nearly a week. The whole time the river was surrounded by towering cliffs, around one-hundred feet straight up. Each night strong winds would come rushing down the canyon. We had to unpack and sleep on sandbars, often with the wind trying to blow all of our rafts and equipment away.
The green river is kind of slow and does not have many rapids, if any at all. It is just a kind of relaxing river run. There is always the possibility of flash floods though, that could come at night. It could rain anywhere miles and miles upstream and we could still end up having a flashflood where we were at. We always tried to find a sandbar as high as we could, so that we would not be washed out if a flashflood came. Fortunately none ever came. It might have been fun though, to have a flashflood come. It would have added a little more excitement to our trips and give us something more to talk about. I have not ever really gone white water rafting, although I would really like to. It looks pretty fun. I have just done the slower rivers. They are kind of nice too though. It is nice to be able to just sit back and relax as you float down the river.
I went kayaking for the first time this last summer. That is a hobby I really enjoy and would like to start doing more. I went with a large group, and was on a two man kayak. It was fun though, much more fun than just tubing or rafting. You have a lot more control in a kayak, and you can speed up and move around much quicker. It can move much faster than a tube or a raft can. We only kayaked for an hour or so, but I really want to go again. I need to get my own kayak at the online hobby store and more so I can go as often as I like.
Anyway, river rafting is one of my favorite hobbies for many reasons. I do not know why. Maybe it is just because I like to be in the water so much. It gets so hot in the summer sometimes, even in Utah, and it is nice just to have something to do to cool off. I like that it is an activity that I can do for free too. After I have my tubes, rafts, or kayaks, it is something I can do over and over again without a cost for anything, except the gas to drive up the canyon.
Peter Jay is the Owner/President and CEO of Variety Access – Your online hobby store and more. For more information about hobbies, hobby products, or Variety Access, go to www.VarietyAccess.com.