On a recent hiking trip, we emerged from our forest fun to find the previously empty parking lot filled with half a dozen sport utility vehicles and a number of people milling around.
“What have we bumped into here?” we thought.
It was a group of eight or ten men aged between twenty years old and up to about about sixty. Several of them wore the clothes one might associate with hunting. Since this happened to be the first day of deer hunting season, we began to fear that we had stumbled onto some sort of hunting expedition.
But our concerns soon disappeared as we realized that we were approaching a group of radio controlled car enthusiasts!
They had brought their collection of RC monster trucks and jeeps to the woods to race through the leaves and see whose car could scale the steepest hill, or crawl over the biggest rocks. We chatted them up, aided by Bluey’s many questions about how these cars worked and who built them.
They were the friendliest bunch of guys you could hope to run into! They were more than happy to show off their cars unique capabilities and to explain how they functioned. They said they’d just come back from a big meet up in Arkansas, driving 15 hours each way to race their trucks through the trails.
Bluey was thrilled and immediately wanted to join their club and go racing with them.
We were glad to have talked to them and wished we weren’t on a bit of a time crunch to get TRDad to work. We gladly would have spent all afternoon with these nice gentlemen.
Instead we drove home talking about cars and vowing to research their club to try to get Bluey involved. Our son charged up his own remote controlled truck as soon as he got home and then drove it around the neighborhood.
We were thrilled to have met these guys and happy that our decision to interact with these strangers was the right one. We met a group of people we could easily have over-looked or actively avoided, people who pursue a hobby that our young son finds fascinating.
All for the simple effort of choosing to say “Hello!”
