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| Bronze of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the Plaza de Espana in Madrid. |
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After our great stay in Holland we travelled to Madrid to meet up with some friends from Canada, take in the sights, imbibe to excess and enjoy the warm, sunny weather.
One afternoon I met up with Alf Comps, owner/designer of Barrage Miniatures who is making waves with his excellent terrain mats and very fine resin scenery (see MiniMike's review of his mat here).
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| A mat in process of creation. |
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| 28mm Vietnamese raised hut - wonderful... |
Alf is a real renaissance man, vastly talented, embarrassingly generous and incredibly enthusiastic about the hobby. We went out for a wonderful lunch and then he took me to his workshop space to let me see what he was working on. It was incredible. I won't go into detail on all the projects he has in development, but all of them are fantastic and real labours of love. Keep an eye out for Barrage miniatures as I think there will be many interesting products emerging from Alf's fevered mind.
A few days later I had a fabulous visit over tapas and beer with Benito, the creator of Gaming with TooFatLardies.
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| Benito gets the Sophia Loren vaseline-on-the-lens treatment. |
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| Whereas Benito proves to be the far better photographer (I blame it on the beer...). |
We had a great time chatting about many aspects of the hobby, our passions and peccadilloes and how blogging has really brought the community together. A wonderful evening - thank you Benito!
Finally, I made the pilgrimage to an excellent hobby shop in central Madrid called 'Atlantica Juegos' (thank you for the tip Mike!). I was pretty gobsmacked when I walked through the doors as the store seemed to have almost everything a historical wargamer could possibly want (Perry, Empress, Artizan, Warlord, Dixon, Minarions, Capitan, 4Ground and the list goes on). It also had an impressive Fantasy and Sci-Fi section, but I didn't examine the stock as closely as the historical offerings. Of course I didn't get away unscathed, picking up a variety of treats that I couldn't easily source back in Canada (more on that later).
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| Outside of 'Atlantica' with my loot. |
Next up: We conclude our European campaign with an assault on Paris.
