Good luck! Like Chile Pepper, I could hula hoop like a champ when I was little. Now I pick them up and can't make them go around even once. I get regular practice (having a 10 year old daughter and a scout troop helps!) but I just can't get the hang of them anymore. Personally, I blame the presence of hips, and the different width-of-body to diameter-of-hula-hoop ratio between little kids and adults. Kids in my scout troop who had never seen them before could pick them up and just go. And the ones who HAD played with them before were amazing--I had two girls who had multiple hoops going around and they kept this up for a good 10 minutes.

You can still buy them at large toys stores--check around where they have the bins of playground balls and such.

Sarah