I cought an early train at the Santa Maria train station at around 8:30 and headed out. The train had little compartments and this italian family shared the six seat cabin I was in, however they got off halfway through the trip, leaving me in the cabin alone for the rest of the way. I arrived in Modena at around 10:15am and (with some initial trouble) found the correct bus to get me to my stop. Neat side note, I drank a ton of caffeine on the way to the train station, so at Modena I really needed to take a piss. So I get to the washroom and there are two paper towel dispensers on the wall. I thought that was a bit odd. However, when I got into the stall, it was just a hole in the floor. So yeah, fairly interesting toilet.
Anyway, back to the real story. I got to games day in this sort of large meeting hall based around a single large auditorium. Basically, the whole event was staged in hallways on the first and second floor of this place, while they had a few seminars in the auditorium. I decided to get my forge world order out of the way first and after a half an hour of waiting, I was able to pass my reservation order email to an employee to get my order. Some folks didn't get an order in ahead of time and were basically pointing at the catalogue taking ages to get through. Anyway, after that I got a book signed by the famous author Gav Thrope, who also wrote my chaos space marine rule book. I then followed him to the auditorium for a Q&A session, however there was a bit of a problem in that all the questions were asked in Italian and never translated (loudly) to english. Then Gav would reply in english and the translator would translate it back to italian. So, I got &A but no Q. Ah well, I leaned some neat tid-bits about projects he might work on, but nothing warhammer related, all Black Library related.
They had demo tables for all the current and no-longer supported Games Workshop games. So they had Warhammer 40k and Fantasy battles, but also Mordheim, Warmaster and Aeronautica Imperialis. There was also two xbox's set up with the new game "Space Marine", but I didn't care for that. I ended up getting a game in with a guy from Sicily and you can read about that here.
The event closed at five and I found myself heading back to the train station (with less concern this time and som italian fellow almost had a heart attack when the bus stopped violntly and my army cas fell off a seat. He didn't speak english, but I cought the jist of what he said. I then overheard him talk to some other folks about their forge world orders and I could pick up a bit of what they were saying as I knew what they were talking about, at least. When I went to change trains in Bologna to head back to Firenze, I made the fatal discovery that what I thought was the 'departure time' on th e ticket, was in fact the estimated arrival time and ended up missing my intended train. by like ten minutes. Note to self, when I don't know when an event will end...don't by return tickets in advance.
All in all, a really great day and besides a couple of hick-ups well worth the trip. Also, while stranded in Bologna for a little bit I found out that one of my Favorite bands..Fleet Foxes..Will be playing there next month, so a negative turned into an opportunity to see them live at long last.
On the way back to Firenze, I got a message from one of the girls that I should stop by the studio as soon as I got back, as it was a friend, I thought that something serious might have happened by the abruptness of the message. In reality, they just wanted me to change a lightbulb for them. I then got an opportunity to describe what I had done, to an audience which didn't really care.
Train cabin
Venue
Some of the hall
My Banner!
Gav @ Q&A
Some of the cool stuff (Armies on Parade and random tables)
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