Crisis 2017, an Odyssey

Hoi,

Last Saturday me and the boy visited the Crisis convention in Antwerp, usually this would result in just one blogpost but this time I think I'll need 3 to relate what happened.

Why 3 posts? Well mainly due to two things: one is that usually I travel to Antwerp by car and this takes about 1,5 hours to get there from my home. This year however, mainly due to my own stubbornness, I had no car transport and Arthur and myself had to rely on public transport. Second I knew up front that Curt from the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, was going to the Crisis. This meant I just plainly HAD to go! Since there's no direct train going we had to switch trains at 3 station and the trip took just about 3 hours.
The trip took us from my hometown to Maastricht, to Liege, Louvois and finally Antwerp. 

 Upon arriving in Antwerp we had a lot of trouble getting to the Waagnatie building because due to all the roadworks the busses couldn't get there and so that took another hour. We started out at 07.00hrs and were inside the Crisis hall at 12.00hrs.

Arthur took all this like a real trooper, it did help that I'd had the foresight to download a Dutch children's movie (Mees Kees if you're interested) onto my tablet and the second half of the journey he got to watch that.

Strangely enough all bus-drivers in Antwerp kept insisting on Arthur being 5 years old (instead of the 6 he really is) so he didn't have to pay for his ticket... At the Antwerp station we accidentally met a nice Belgian man "Jeroen" who wanted to go to the Crisis too and helped us with the 1,5km walk from the last bus-stop to the event hall.

At the hall we met up with lot's of old friends and also some very interesting new ones. Right beside the Too Fat Lardie stand we bumped into Curt and Lord Roundwood and had a nice chat. We decided to catch Curt up later for a drink and chat some more after doing a round of the hall. Like last year, I had given Arthur my camera so he could photograph anything he liked. It's a way to keep him motivated and interested and besides my pictures usually are not that good so you'd better go to other blogs for a good photoreport. I'll post up Arthurs pics tomorrow. While taking pictures Rich from Too Fat Lardies came over to me, shook my hand and congratulated me on "getting em into the hobby so young!" wow!

Like the dumb-ass I am I forgot to take pictures of our meet-up with all our friends like Jan-Willem, Johan, Peter, Stefan, Adam, Curt and Dave D. But meeting up was an absolute pleasure at that.

I'll post a 3rd post regarding my loot in a few days so won't go into that here, but I did only buy what I really needed or liked and thus left the hall with money left over in my pocket. At 14.00hrs we met up with some friends and went to a nearby bar to get a drink, afterwards these splendid blokes walked us to a bus-stop found with the help of the bar's waitress  where we said goodbye. Only... due to the roadworks the bus couldn't get there. So after standing there for 10 minutes  we asked a passer-by, who told us to get a trolley-car some way away from the stop. After 30 minutes walking through the rain and with two of the trams driving away right in front of us, we got into one that took us to the station. From there on it all was easy to get home. While walking through the rain Arthur was sitting on my shoulders and the packs were filled with literally a KG of metal the lad casually remarked: "are you going to get that driver's license now dad?" cheeky as the remark was, he's right and so yes I'll probably make some more serious work of that.

As said I will post some more about this later on but I'd like to add one more thing to this report of our journey: it might seem I am complaining about everything but I am not! I had a total blast with my son and with some great guys and got some lovely figures to top it all, it was amazing!

Cheers Sander

P.S. see Curt's blog for his report.