Back at the Keyboard

Got back from holiday yesterday afternoon, - just had a week in Morocco, doing the "Royal Cities", hence the distinct lack of blogs and progress on painting the District 9 aliens.

The holiday had a lot of coach travel to fit in Marrakech, Fes, Rabat and Casablanca, but was very enjoyable none the less. No real wargaming connection for me, - except I dabbled with the Rif Wars many years ago as I fancied the idea of chasing Arab horse men with Renault light tanks. I even bought the Matchbox tank kit & a packet of Airfix Bedouins. And some Revell Foreign Legion. Anyway, never made much progress with it.

Of course I get inspired by most things I see, so the idea of doing an Almorovid army keeps creeping up on me. Fortunately Hat haven't released the Arab cavalry boxes in their El Cid range, so I may escape.

Marrakech is striking, with its medieval walls still very prevalent. It is also mostly pink, with a marvellously hand made look about it as you can see from the picture. In fact I'm rather encouraged that my scratch built desert buildings looks more authentic than those from some resin suppliers! Alas, on reviewing my photos I notice that I have completely failed to take any pictures of the more scruffy bits of any Moroccan cities, - which is odd because I thought I'd taken quite a few. Maybe they're on the video camera. Anyway it is the sort of colour that'd get laughed at if you actually painted your model buildings that way and put them on a wargames table.

The northern cities - such as Rabat and Casablanca are more pale yellow and white (hardly a surprise for "Casablanca") so I won't be repainting any time soon.

So now I have the task of editing the pictures and doing the captions and trying to make sense of the video footage and then catching up on all the stuff that hasn't been done for the last week. Like sorting out my credit card company who are a bunch of numpties, fixing my mobile broadband dongle (which finally arrived) and a host of other stuff

Last note: My earlier blogs have talked about how I'm careful with what I use to paint figures so I have to do little mixing and what I want to use is readily available locally. Hence I use some GW colours, - in this case "Bronzed Flesh". I found out today it has been discontinued, so thanks to the 12 year old in my local GW store who went into their basement to retrieve me the last two pots.