72 hours to takeoff

 Wednesday,  April 19 will soon be here. We've booked our ride to the airport, received a "looking forward to serving you" email from the hotel in London and even booked a table for dinner in Paris next Sunday evening. Hopefully, Eurostar won't be disrupted by labor problem on either end. 

I expect to post plenty of pictures of the trip, so stay tuned.

 Three weeks from today, I will be revisiting Little Venice for dinner alongside the canal with my wife. I've probably been to London fifteen times, but somehow  I'd missed this area until 2017 when I visited the Warwick Castle Pub in the area. My son was with me on that trip, drinking coffee while I enjoyed a pint on a fine spring evening. 

I think that my wife will enjoy both the area and the waterside diner. 

As the trip nears, I will be posting more about our upcoming adventures

 Four weeks from today, I will be attending Salute at ExCeL for the first time since 2017. I'm certainly looking forward to the show and also to riding there  on the Elizabeth Line. 

After a long break, I've gotten back to painting. As usual, I'm not doing one project at a time is several different scales. When I make some more progress  I'll post some pictures

Preparing for a Spring Offensivie

Now that it seems as if Winter has finally departed, I can start preparing for my Spring Painting Offensive. The good weather allows me to spray prime outside on our balcony, as long as I take precautions not to prime my wife's flowers or planters. Now the question is "What do I prime?".

I think that I only need to add a few more figures to have a full platoon of late WW II Germans in 28 mm  for Chain of Command, so I don't need to prime large amounts of them. The same applies for my late war Canadians and Germans in 20 mm. What I really need to work on is vehicles and terrain pieces, things that I've been avoiding for some time. If the weather remains nice, I'll put in a few hours this week on spray priming those items and maybe some Sarissa North Africa building that have been sitting around, still in kit form. 

Cigar Box Battle Mats

Earlier this week, two 6' x 4' Cigar Box Battle mats arrived in the mail. My initial excitement was tempered when I realized that I'd have to clear my work/project/junk table to actually deploy the mats. Clearing the table is always a major project because I always come across long abandoned, half finished, project that pulls me in an unintended direction. 

  Now back to the mats, they are everything I expected them to be. They actually impressed my wife, who usually has a neutral to negative view of my hobby purchases. The dimensions of mats are larger than advertised, allowing for the placement of contours, made of whatever you like, under them. This allows for a rolling surface effect, rather than the billiard table look.  

  I promise I will post some pictures as soon as I get the table cleared of projects, which should be in about a week.