Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Sunday Pt 1 of 2

Why part 1 of 2 you ask?  Because we are currently in Munich (just back from the games night at Hans im Gluck’s offices) and my notes are probably back in Wuppertal so I cannot provide the normal details.  Also because the full story of Sunday does actually continue on to Monday.

However back to Sunday.

The last day of the Spiel and yes we were getting a little tired.

Of course being in this ginourmous area with more games than you could poke a stick at was a great thing.  If you are a boardgamegeek, you really should think about going once.

Games aside a definite highlight was catching up with friends from the other side of the planet (and lets face it most of you are on the other side of the planet from Australia), meeting people face to face for the first time who you had only previously known via their avatars, comments and/or on-line Tigris & Euphrates playing and also for me meeting the people that Melissa had met last year.

I would like to send a quick hello to some of the people I met (apologies for mistakes in missing or misspelling names to to bad note taking or memory), the Lamont families, both the brothers the other Fraser and Gordon and their lovely wives, Uwe R, BasL and his mate the backup Bas, Eric Martin, Friedemann Friese, Klemenz, Andrea Meyer, Bruce Allen, Leo, Jason, James, Kylie, Steve, Ageet, Chris, Jeremiah, Bob, Joe, Richard and many many more,

It was also great to catch up with people I had met previously including (same caveats as above) Moritz, Hanno, Ann, Yvonne, Zev, Derk, Aldie, Michelle, Lincoln, Niike, Doug, Shelley, Jeff, Eric B, Cyrille, Tanja, Phil Davies, Umberto, Stefanie (x2), Petra, Dieter, Jon and many more.  Some of these people we had seen within the last year, but in some cases it had been five years.

We have been on the road since leaving Essen, so I have only browsed a few reports so far, but I keep seeing names of people and thinking “Drats, I wish I had caught up with them!” - Yoki, Gilad, Birgit and Derek are four names that immediately jump to mind.

In the afternoon, I made the first run from Essen back to our flat in Wuppertal.  I loaded the car up with boxes of games and drove back, unladed them and back to the Messe.  This was so that we would have a chance of fitting the whole familly, our clothes and our extra games in the car on the Monday.

Leaving the Spiel I found that K-k-k-ken (our SatNav) knew about an autobahn, or series of them really, that went from right next to the Spiel to within about two kilometres of our flat, which was much better than the route he had taken us to Essen.  On the way back, I tricked him by driving most of that two kilometres before telling to head to P1 at the Essen Messe and hey presto he took me on the good route, which avoided about 10k of Essen local roads.  I thought it was a win, even if nobody else is interested :-)

Arriving back at the Spiel I found that at the end of day 6 I was still finding things that I had never seen before such as the mini doughnut stand.  Why oh why could I have not found that before?  They were delicious!  There were also games that I hadn’t seen before and games I had heard about but never actually found.

That evening a bunch of us met up at a pizza place where we found the Pizza Milano, ham, salami and onion on a pizza that was about the size of a large truck tire.  Yummo!

There were certainly games purchased, games played and beers drunk on that last day, but details we have to wait until next time.

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