Mission Accomplished - Post Number 132 for 2022!

 Today we had a day trip to the Karangahake Gorge about an hour to the east of where we live and undertook a pretty low impact walk with a couple of friends. After about an hour, we were back at the car and travelled a few km further down the road to have a refreshing libation at the historic Waikino Inn. On the return trip, we also stopped off at a Sunflower grower, and my wife picked her own blooms at $3 per stem. We got home around 1630 and will be heading out for an Indian meal around 1800 with our daughter who. because she has to fly tomorrow (New Year's Day) has regretfully decided not to spend the evening with her friends then have to be up at the crack of dawn, hung over for work - very mature!

Here are the pics

What do they say - the light at the end of the tunnel is just a train coming to run you down?!

The above image looks a bit ghostly, the one below was taken literally only another meter closer to the end of the tunnel

A couple of views of the gorge with adjacent highway

I did say to our friends that I would tell my overseas blog readers that this was an ancient Maori temple/fortress!

In actual fact; its late Victorian/Edwardian industrial remains from gold mining in the area

Narrow gauge railway used to move ore to the processing site

The Waikino Inn adjacent to the busy main road

I had an IPA and Ruth a G&T with the local hand-crafted gin, which had small shards of gold leaf in it, hence the name!

The interior of the Inn

Last stop was the sunflower farm - quite an impressive site with acres of fully matured flowers

They also had this rather cool old car - an Austin 7 I think?

Thats all for this post and, indeed, for 2022. My next ramblings will be the first post of the new year, 2023. I hope you all enjoy marking the transition from 2022 - 2023, however you feel is appropriate these days! Thanks for dropping by and leaving comments over the last 12 months and I hope you will all return for more of the same in 2023!

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!

Last But One for 2022!

 Not a lot tonight but my aim is to achieve 132 posts in 2022, my highest annual total, and this is number 131 - so expect another same time tomorrow!

I have made a bit of progress on the SCW buildings, after popping into a local Resene paint store yesterday and buying an appropriate test pot to use on the main walls of the buildings - I figure I can vary it sufficiently by adding some ochre etc to ensure not every building is exactly the same colour.

The buildings completed so far are below. They have pantile roofs printed on our laser printer at work way back in October!

I will add some embellishments probably and will most likely do a few more, but its a small village I am after, bot street fighting in Madrid or Bilbao, so not too many more will be required.

This has been my reading of choice recently, having finished the RCW tome by the same author, this was ordered up via the local library

And last night, I started watching this movie (with subtitles) on YouTube!

Here is the link to the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHVec8Gl8NA

Finally, today we had a 2.5 hour trip up north to Mangawhai, a holiday seaside destination where old friends have a holiday home (the wife Karen went to school with my wife forty plus years ago!). Husband Nick is from Yorkshire and has been out here since around 1990 (they met and married in the UK). Nick was once upon a time a wargamer and always asks me if I am still "doing it" whenever we meet (which has only been pretty rarely, to be honest). At one point in the mid 90's, I almost dragged him back into the madness - he actually gave me the money to purchase a small Front Rank ECW force (which I painted for him) but nothing came of it unfortunately - the figures remained in my possession, and I still have them to this day!

The view from the deck of their holiday home, looking west onto the Tasman Sea

2022 - A Brief Review

Normally I don't do this as I am too lazy to go back and check what I got up to in the preceding twelve months but having read a few other reviews and with my self-imposed aim to hit 132 posts this year, I decided this was a good topic to make use of! So here we go.....

First up, games played. Down a bit on the previous year I believe, but I still managed 30, which isn't too bad, just short of an average of 3 per month. Era's covered included Napoleonic, Russian Civil War, English Civil War, Pulp, Fantasy, Border Reivers, Colonial, WWI aerial and WWII. In a new departure. I also played a few solo games on my "new" 2' x 2' folding card table, which helped raise the total number of games played.

I had the bright idea of "a few" pix of each game - but maybe I have gone a bit overboard....just scroll through quickly, I wont be offended!

Off the painting table marched a multitude of figures to add to the following collections - RCW, SCW, Pulp, Border Reivers and WWII. Included in this count were both 20mm and 28mm figures and equipment, including quite a few 20mm/1/72 scale plastic kits, which is something I have not done a lot of for a few years.

Yes, you have guessed what's coming next, but hey, its Christmas and I have a lot of time on my hands!

Right - that is DEFINITELY more than I intended to do - hope you have found it mildly interesting and honestly, I haven't even got images of everything I painted throughout the year, I did use some discretion and left lots out that I would have liked to have included! Maybe something to look at in 2023 is creating a "Year in Review" folder that I can add images to as the year progresses, so that next Christmas, it is all ready to add to a similar post?

Thanks for dropping by - another post is likely in the next 24 hours!