When people hear that I am a car collector, they either start laughing, saying that I am nearly 30 years old and I should grow up, or mention the thing that this is not one of the girls' common collections.
But, yes, I’m a girl. Yes, I love miniature cars. And no, this isn’t some quirky phase. It’s a full-blown love story with chrome details, perfect paint jobs, and a passion among many others I have, which don't relate much to what girls usually collect. But I enjoy being different.
I actually never considered myself "just another girl" because since I was a kid, I used to act a lot different from my twin sister, our father often making the joke that I am his little son, which I never mind hearing but actually enjoy it in a weird way.
The passion for cars was somehow initiated by my father, who from an early age was teaching me all brands of cars, and while we stopped doing this a long time ago, attending car festivals, seeing powerful cars, or collecting my own little collection survived the years.
Back when I was a kid, I could only have one or two tiny cars to play with, which were really tiny and with not many details, but which I still enjoyed from the bottom of my heart. As years passed, so the toys advanced, and these days you can spend a little fortune on some bigger miniatures of vehicles that come with lots of features.
The ones I have in my collection are 1:32 scale and I find them the perfect size for a collection from pure passion without taking it further, especially that at this size you can enjoy pretty much all the features the bigger models have, such as being able to open the doors, front hood, and trunk but also get audio and lighting effects when opening any of these.
Honda Civic Type-R
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The first car I got, which was going to start a collection a few years later, was a Honda Civic Type-R miniature received as a birthday gift from my boyfriend, who knew how much I loved this car. I still love it, but I prefer the model from 2018 and not the recent one, as I feel like visually it's been tamed and it doesn't look that cool anymore.
I received this car somewhere in 2021 and it played an important role on my shelf gathering lots of attention from the people that was visiting me, but now it found its home inside my computer which I find it the best way to show how important this tiny car will remain for me no matter how many other cars will be added in the collection.
Corvette ZR1
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Mustang Shelby GT500
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Dodge Challenger Hellcat
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Nissan GT-R
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Four years later, after attending UpsideDown Festival last month with my boyfriend, where we got to admire in real life the Dodge, Nissan and Shelby, we ended up thinking how would it be to have one of these cars in miniature on one of the shelves from home.
So while we had this thought before of starting to collect cars, we never really took any steps towards it until I figured out that we had no gift for each other on the occasion of the International Children's Day. Hence why, I hang on this excuse to place an order for the four models of cars from above, where I still dream to see the Corvette someday in real life as it's one of my all time favorite sport cars but also the first vehicle I usually purchase in racing video games because I find it so cool!
Porsche 911 GT3
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Mercede Benz G63
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Jeep Wrangler Rubicon
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Ford Raptor F150
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Red Bull F1 RB19
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It's always hard to keep surprises away from my boyfriend as we often make gifts to each other and get excited too quickly, revealing what the other person will receive the next day, but somehow I managed to keep the four car miniatures purchased secret until we received them. There is no need to say how happy he was when seeing them, but he equally felt like it was his turn to get a few more of these to make our collection even bigger, so the 5 models from above were his picks.
Actually, the Ford Raptor F150 is my father's all-time favourite car, which he has never stopped dreaming of the day he will drive one, so we are strongly reconsidering making this one a spontaneous gift to him.
The Red Bull F1 RB19 doesn't represent much, but that we have a guilty pleasure to watch F1 in general and that we had Verstappen and Pérez as our favourite team during their debut. It's actually the single car miniature that came in a box, and it felt so sad to see it being mostly damaged during shipping, but we still love it, and we are happy to have this part as our car miniatures collection.
I don't know yet when the next addition of cars will be, or what other vehicles in miniature we will get, but getting 9 new miniature cars in a single year already makes 2025 a lot better for both of us.
Gabriela Travels is the FOUNDER of "Festival Mania" who started this community from the passion of attending various festivals and with the purpose of encouraging more people to explore festivals all around the world and share their experiences.
At the same time, Gabriela is an independent Graphic Design Freelancer since 2019 completing over 600+ orders in this time and collaborating with various businesses and people from all over the globe.
Additionally, Gabriela has her own corner on the internet since 2017 where she writes various articles for her blog, the most popular being the travel ones (300+ articles written on this field), but also approaching other topics as well, like game reviews, lets plays, movie and series reviews, photography posts, cooking recipes and more, boosting the total number of articles written to 750+ blog posts.
Gabriela is also a gamer since she was 11 years old and gaming remains one of her biggest passions along with traveling, owning a YouTube channel for each of the two.
~ @GabrielaTravels ~