Omaka Classic Fighters - Day 2

Dawn broke on day 2 to find us trekking up Wither Hills.

Photo of Rob & I by Lee

In 2013 we'd discovered this was quite the nice walk to get a good view over Blenheim and the Omaka Aerodrome (where the show was being held).

The WW1 planes also often use the lighter winds at this time of the morning to get some practice! That means you can get a few shots like this in the early morning light...

Overlooking Wither Hills towards Cloudy Bay

Overlooking the aerodrome

From there, it was time to check out the Omaka Heritage Centre. If you haven't been, it is a must do. The displays are amazing thanks to Weta Workshops.

This guy creeps me out every time I see him - so life like!

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the centre in a few years as they expand to WW2.

After the centre, it was time to head back out into the sun and check out what was on offer. The show always has a large contingent of re-enactors for the ground theater along with plenty of planes on display. 

From a show perspective, Friday is just the practice day - a chance for the pilots to practice prior to the start of the main event on Friday night - the twilight show. Below are a selection of photos from throughout the practice flying and into the twilight show.

I've had a play with a few of the photos to either create a black and white or, for the Huey, try for a vintage look. The sunset also created some interesting colours and silhouettes. 

 Yes... it is a replica V1 that could fly. Flew around the aerodrome quite well!

The Focke Wulf 190 was the main draw card. It looks and sounds so impressive.

But disaster struck! The plane ground looped on landing. The pilot walked away unharmed and was flying again a little later. Unfortunately not so for the FW-190.... reports so far say that one of the brakes failed causing the spin.

Something you won't see anywhere else in the world.... nine Fokkers in the air.

With the FW-190 crash, the big draw card was gone. Until the organisers announced another surprise was nearly here. We all scanned the horizon in the fading light and a shape could be made out....

The griffin powered Mk 14 Spitfire. A plane that had been restored and only had it's first flight the night before! It just roared through like it owned the place!

Finally, the finale. A covers band playing classic NZ & Oz hits followed by a massive and I mean massive fireworks display. Some money went up in smoke with that! (I need to have a play at merging a few of the photos to see if I can get some better firework ones).

That brought Friday to a close and it was off home for an early night ready for an early start on Saturday.

Omaka Classic Fighters - Arrival

I'm back and slowly working through a few photos from a great Easter weekend away down in Marlborough.

Great company, great show, lots of photos, beer and a bit of wine :)

All in all a fantastic time.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to blog about the trip, but in particular, about the Classic Fighters 2015 show. The easiest is just going to be a day by day account.

So prepare yourself for some long photo heavy blog posts!

Today's will be small though as I work through picking out the photos to post from each show day.

Thursday was day 1 and it was arrival day.

Time to get ourselves orientated by finding all the vineyards... :)

Here's how it started...

A late lunch at a very nice and relaxed winery.

The Moa brewery just happened to be down the road...

Heaven! Until we did the tasting and got stitched up with a couple of tastings of sour beers. No thank you. Still the others were pretty good. 

And coming from a rather large bottling plant, I did like watching the little single head filler at work...

Next stop more wine... more tastings. It's a hard life.

The Wither Hills cellar room smelled so nice. The wine was good too.

Then it was onto chocolate. Something I was less interested in, but Lee and Rob seemed a little more keen...

After that it was back to the accommodation to get ourselves organised and then off to the Dodson St beer garden for more beers and dinner (recommended if you are ever in Blenheim!).

Stay tuned. More to follow soon :)

Zombies! And a birthday

This week one of the crew celebrate a big birthday! You'll have to read to end to find out who...(but no it's not me!) :)

So, since this Sunday was the closest gaming day to the birthday... it was pizza, beers and games with more pizza and beers to watch the cricket after (but we won't talk about that one...).

When I arrived Mark and Rob were playing a game of Bolt Action. 500pts each and just killing each other to make it simple. Japanese (Rob) vs. British (Mark). I wasn't really following the game to give it much narrative, but I did snap off a few pics. Having played around with some black & whites on Saturday, I decided to try the same thing here :)

I think the British won, but only just!

The end of the game saw the timely arrival of Lee, so it was time to break out the first beers and play something that all of us could join in on - Zombicide!!!

I would be El Cholo for this game. A board was set-up. We had to free a team mate and then escape the board.

I think we may have had too many zombie spawning points...

That is pretty much every zombie on the board. It's not looking good! But then Lee spots a gap and gets the rescued team mate out through the exit. Rob and I charge through a group of zombies and see the exit, so make good our escape....

... whilst waving goodbye to Lee, Phil and Mark's characters who were just too slow. And the zombies close in....

So much for teamwork. At least some of us survived though :)

Finally, rather than another game of Zombicide, Phil ran us through a game of the recent Kickstarter that he had received - Cthulu Wars

Models & board looked pretty good and who doesn't like the idea of Great Old One's stomping around fighting each other!?!

I got to be Nyarlathotep. I'll leave it to your imagination to decide what the model looks like. Mark loved it :)

As far as I could tell, the basic premise is to control areas by building gates on them. This increases your power allowing you to do more stuff and more gates gives you more doom (which is what I think you need to win the game). I'm sure there is more to it though.

Gameplay seemed relatively simple and each of the Old Ones has very different spells and abilities. Would take a bit of time to figure out how to use each of them in the best manner... although it was a little odd that the game owner had already claimed Cthulu as his choice of character. He had clearly studied Cthulu's dirty tricks!

Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the game and decided to have some more beers instead.

So....

Happy 40th Mark! Have a good one :) Hope you enjoyed your day on Sunday.

Next week's post might be some what delayed. I expect I will have a few photos to work through as Lee, Rob Mark G and I will be at this over Easter -

Getting pretty excited now. Looks like its going to be a good show again. Fingers crossed all this scratchy crappy weather clears!

Stay tuned :)