Toy Stores

When Robbie and I travel, there are several places we like to visit wherever we are - bookstores, scrapbooking stores, comic shops and toy stores. Of course, we also enjoy the usual tourist attractions and local restaurants, but a trip would not be complete without a stop at one of these types of stores. (Today's prompt in the Blogging for Scrapbookers class is all about favorites lists and links, so I've included links to some of our favorite toy stores in this post.)

Several years ago, I had to make a quick business trip to New York and discovered for the first time the Toys R Us store in Times Square. The photos from that trip have been in my 2007 storage binder for a while, and I decided this week would be the perfect time to create a layout. I used the One Page Sketch #4 from Sketch Support for this layout. I rotated the sketch and then created a second page as well.

I was inspired to create the heart flower embellishments by Tammy's Flower Tutorial post. Several times I've seen scrappers using a heart punch to create flowers and have been meaning to give it try. I had printed one of Tammy's photos and put the printout and my heart punch on my craft table so I could try this technique on my next layout, which turned out to be this one about Toys R Us. I really like how easy these were to create with leftover scraps of my patterned papers.

Journaling reads: My first time to visit the Toys R Us store in New York! It is huge - a 3 story Ferris wheel inside the store! A life size dinosaur and amazing Lego displays. My only regret was that Robbie was not with me to enjoy the wonder.

Now for those of you who are feeling sorry for Robbie right now (he is the toy/trading card/game collector of the family after all!), we traveled to New York later that year and were able to enjoy the store together. Since then we've visited toy stores around the world. Here we are in front of the carousel inside the largest toy store in Moscow, Russia, aptly named The Children's World.

And it never fails to amaze me what can be made out of Legos, like this R2D2 I saw at Hamley's in London.

Of course, if you are traveling with children, it might be detrimental to your pocketbook to stop at every toy store along the way. (Actually, now that I think about it, it's sometimes detrimental to our pocketbook, too! LOL)

If you have a favorite toy store, please share it with me in the comments! Do you have any favorite shops or sites that you frequent when you're away from home?Where do you like to stop when you're traveling?

(BTW - I'll be back later today with the winner of my blogiversary giveaway!)