How did you start?

[dauker]

Back in high school I started in on Swisher Sweets. Don't really remember why, but I remember driving around the hills in my jeep smoking a wood tipped cherry flavored swisher sweet. In college once in a great while I'd buy a pack of swishers to smoke on occasion. That's when my dad would often have a pack of Roughnecks laying around that him and I would share. Once I graduated college, I'd venture into the humidor at whatever shop I found and grab one or two sticks of what of what I could afford, but that was far and few in between. I tended to stick to A. Fuente line. Then about 3 years ago my mother got my a small 15 count humidor for Christmas. That brought me completely into this "hobby." I now have a 150 count humidor. I find I'm more of a cigar collector then smoker, I only smoke 1 stick every 2 to 3 weeks on average.

[Namerifrats]

I guess I can add mine here. I smoked my first Cigar 1 week ago today to be exact. It was a cheap Thompson Cheroot a friend at work gave me because he had gotten a box of 50 from his girlfriend's dad for Chirstmas. Aparently, her dad is really big into Cigars. Well, we both work for the railroad and were talking about Christmas and he told me about the cigars. I started to remember my great gandfather being a tobacco farmer his entire life and always smoking a pipe and the smell. Then sometime's I'd go with my grandpa to the little feed and seed store for horse feed and there would always be a few old men sitting around in there smoking the big cigars that had a nice smell. So I ask him about them and he said he would bring a couple to work the next night and we would smoke them. Well that started it. Over the past 4 days I've spent around $100 and have 15 Mid Range Cigars and a 10 Cigar Sample pack from Thompson on the way. I usually head into a new interest / hobby pretty quickly, so I find myself without a good humidor and a growing number of sticks. So this weekend, I plan to work on the storage situation. But since that first smoke (never tried cigarettes, I think they stink) I bought a cheap pack of Backwoods at the grocery store and they were ok I guess, but I bought a cheap $2 Don Lugo Corona and actually thought it tasted alright for a cheaper cigar. So I went and bought alot more, wide variety and several $5-$8 smokes to try. And I found this forum, so here I am.