I won't bore you with the details, but this passed weekend saw me back in Wellington, back meeting with Steve and Alex, and back participating in geekery - this time at the Wellington Model Train Expo .
The place was filled with fathers taking their children on day trips (that is why Steve and Alex were there), my guess is that the number of females over the age of twelve could be counted on fingers of one hand.
The trains themselves were actually pretty cool - they ranged from being obviously a lot of work all the way up to obviously being a ridiculous amount of work. Almost all of the displays had cutaways in the middle containing least one middle aged man at the controls, contentedly watching his trains glide around the tiny landscape. I was slightly disappointed that none of them were wearing a striped engineer's hat, they probably only wear them in private.
Talking with one of the guys standing proudly beside a very impressive multilevel desert vista I learned that the display was owned by a club, and it was only the portable version. The original back in their club rooms was four times the size!
The most impressive displays were the ones that used the very smallest gauge of track. At such a small scale, a vast amount of scenery could be included, even if the total area used was not large. In fact, the display we all agreed was the best was no bigger than my dinner table.
This was one of the best $5 I have ever spent, and I walked out into the bright Wellington sunlight with the warm feeling of knowing that no matter how many hours I spend reading bad sci-fi novels or playing computer games, I will never be as geeky as those guys.