19 October 2009

Marauders Mayhem 09 - Day 1

My fiancé and I headed down to Dayton Thursday after work. We have friends in the area, so last year (my first Marauders tournament) and again this year, we decided to make a long weekend of the trip. We headed down a day early this time. I wanted to see the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum (more of that in a future entry!) and she had an audition in Columbus Friday afternoon.



Thursday Disaster

Disaster struck, however, about an hour into our trip, heading south from Cleveland. It was dark and someone left their bumper stretched across the center lane of the highway. We ran right over it. The tires were OK, as was the front skirt, below the bumper. But the plastic wheel well on the passenger side, which continues up the underside of the body to the front bumper/skirt (protects the wiper fluid reservoir, etc.) was torn apart and dragging on the ground. The whel rubbed the inside/front of the wheel well liner and shredded it pretty bad. I attempted to just stuff everything in place, jamming it into the frame, out of the way & off the road, but that only held a few miles. But at least it got us closer to civilization.

At the next exit we scrounged around the gas station. I was looking for anything with which to tie up the plastic shield. They had very little. My options seemed to be dental floss, bandage tape, or buying a phone charger or set of headphones and cutting them up for the wire. I was ready to try the bandage, when the clerk suggested the Walmart down the street. In the mean time I took a knife and cut some of the dangling, shredded bits off the liner. At the Walmart we got some cable ties which did the trick and are still holding everything together today. I take the car in to look for a replacement liner tomorrow morning.

The next day I noticed that the lower body trim on the passenger side was also missing. It seems to have been held on with about 7 or 8 plastic clips, several of which are missing, many of the remaining are broken.

The thing that pisses me off is that this is my fiancé's first nice car. We bought it just a few months ago, after she graduated from college. She's been very excited about having a new car, and one that's not a POS beater. So I'm hoping I can find the body replacement cheap enough to get it taken care of in the near future. But with the holidays & our wedding coming up, we're already trying to watch our money. :/


Friday

I will talk about Friday in a future entry.



Marauders Day 1, the pre-game show

Below are photos I took Saturday morning, during the pre-tournament voting for "General's Choice." I forgot to change some of the camera settings from the day before, so a lot of the pics didn't come out as nice as I'd like. Many didn't come out well at all, so this is only a fraction of the photos.















5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the great pictures.

    I have never played in a tournament before, so I don't really get to see a lot of different fully-painted armies (aside from the ones I see all the time at the local club).

    Pictures like these are what I wish White Dwarf contained more of.

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  2. I think you played my pal Alex and his Ogres Round 1? he's posting on our local forum about this awesome looking empire army by a guys named Thomas..so I figure its got to be your Marienburgers, Jon Cash Empire is also Epic looks like that turn marker is new since I last saw him.
    This looks like on I will have to try to make next years..so about the road hassles hope you had a good time.

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  3. Yeah, I played Alex in Round 2. Battle report coming soon. Alex got my best comp score vote. We joked about his tyrant, who took two cannon shots full on but lived, having balls of steel. I think it also takes balls of steel to run an MSU OK army like that. Marauders is a good tournament to try different armies at, though. Very nice looking army, too. (For anyone else wondering, it's the OK army in my photos, with some snow on the bases.)

    Cash swept the tournament. He did well in all categories and easily had the finest looking army there. I had heard about that army from other people, but this was my first time seeing it in person. (I think he was running other armies at previous tournaments we've both competed at.)

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  4. Great pics man, I've been looking forward to your Marauder coverage :) Superb armies in those shots alone, and I'm especially happy to see the ogre armies - double hunter / double yhets one particularly, wow!

    Atrocious luck on the bumper ordeal. I feel for your gal, I've only had my first new car for about 1.5 years but I'd still be torn up if something disastrous happened to my baby ...

    - Salvage

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  5. That was part of his army's theme. They were roaming hunters, hence the particular composition.

    I've got a little write-up he did for his army, and handed out with his copy of his army list.

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