I recently got into Parks on the Air, where you go to parks with radio equipment and try to make 10 contacts. It's fun, gets me out of the house and can be an interesting challenge depending on atmospheric conditions. I built a small kit radio (https://qrp-labs.com/qmx.html) for use when visiting some of the parks that have longer hikes to interesting areas. Building the radio was a great lesson in electronics and exposed how horrible my soldering skills were. My curiosity about how the SDR stuff worked, especially the transmitting side, led me to reading lots of great posts and information about RF, modulation, etc.

The emergency preparedness side of things is an important side of amateur radio, but learning is an equally if not larger part of it.