As a child my parents would sometime, such as on long holiday breaks, leave my brother and I at the care of our grandparents, with both sets living fairly close to each other, but an hour and a half drive from home.
Neither my maternal or paternal grandparents had computers, so other ways of entertaining myself had to be found.
TV was one such way, but until the mid-90's we only had 2 stations to choose from, which didn't always have child appropriate shows.
A VCR was available, and walking down to the video rental store and picking something out was as much fun as watching what we chose, it seems we have seen all the classic Looney Tunes and Disney cartoons that way.
My maternal grandparents also had some video tapes passed down from the American branch of our extended family, degraded copies of such classics as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Alice in Wonderland.
Grandma had some girl magazines from when she was a girl (dad's mom is a holocaust survivor who didn't have much left from her childhood, but she survived them all.) which didn't quite suit my taste, but beggars can't be choosers and they were marginally better than grandpa's gardening magazines - there are only so many ads for sprinkler systems I can look at.
Another hit from that time was going to the supermarket to buy freeze pops and something banned from the US and no longer imported to Israel - Kinder eggs. These things had amazing toys inside (unless you had the bad luck of getting a statue) which were a joy to assemble, and fun to play with for about ten minutes.
When I discovered arcades I found there was one in a nearby shopping center, and would spend countless hours in there, even just to watch demo modes going on. Later I found a few others to haunt, longer to walk too and full of cigarette smoke, but with new games to look at.
I even started getting money to play, even though I hadn't asked for any, probably because my brother got bored just tagging along.
In closing, I think these experiences had a lot of impact on my creativity these days, even if it isn't always obvious exactly how.
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