I felt bored last week, so I called a good friend and asked him if he wanted to have some fun. Sure, he said, so off we went.
And fun we had.
And not a lot of sleep either, about 4 hours in 2 1/2 day. But hey, sometimes you have to be a crazy fool to get something nice.
So, this isn't the tipical road trip report, with tons of pictures of roads, road signs, etc.,I just want to show some photo's of a trip Gyruss and I made last weekend.
As some of you know, I bought a Black Widow in the UK a few weeks ago, and it was time to collect it. But not only the Black Widow, Gyruss happened to buy a nice working Moon Patrol from the same seller, based in Cambridge. And if that was not all, I also had to collect two games from Rav, Joust and HOTD, games that I bought in June, but I didn't had the time and opportunity to collect them earlier.
But that's still not all, because of a special occasion I also had the opportunity to got another great game, Phoenix, a game that I played a lot a looooooong time ago. And to conclude this, Pieter and I also collected games for others as well. In total the two of us transported 9 games to the mainland.
I could tell pages and pages about the preparation, but I won't. Just believe me that it's a trip that I don't want to do ever again (that is, until the next great opportunity arises
)
This is the route that we took, 1700 km's in total. In total the trip took 42 hours, from Friday night 10 PM until Sunday afternoon 4 PM. Unfortunately Pieter wasn't allowed to drive the van (and I wouldn't have trusted him to do so
, just kidding), so I had a great and long driving experience in the UK.
To fund my new purchases, I had (and have) to sell other gaming stuff, like this very NOS and pretty rare Sega Aero City:
I only had it for like 2 months, but it had to go, so I put up an add last wednesday and it was gone within 24 hours! Although I very much regretted to sell it, it made more than double the money, so it was a good investment I guess
And I was very lucky with the location of the buyer, because he was also located in Cambridge, only 5 miles from my first pick up address (Black widow).
She is so lonely
Going on the train, at 5 AM I believe. Because of the size and weight of the van, and also because of the volume of the goods on the way back, we had to take the freight train.
Arriving in Cambridge, at 8 AM. I believe I woke up the buyer of the Aero City half an hour earlier saying that we would soon be there, but I knew him already (well known in the Candy cab world) and he was OK with the early arrival.
Typical English:
Unloading the Aero, bye bye
After a short chat, we then drove a few miles to our second address, to James, where Black Widow
and Moon Patrol
were waiting. By the way, James has some nice games
After getting the games in the van, we drove off to our third address to collect the remaing games. It was a drive of about two hours, we got hungry, we ate something at MacDonalds somewhere and even saw a Namco arcade, although, the place was not worthy the name Arcade:
At about 2 PM we arrived at Archer Maclean's house, where we met a lot of friends, Olly (Alpha1), Ravage, Hi, Atarimania and later Bruno and Chris joined us also. What a coincedence! And then there was also Archer himself. It was great to meet him and talk with him. He is a very kind man and a fanatic arcade game collector and very good in restoring project games. In fact, the Black Widow that I bought from James, was originally a beaten up Gravitar, which Archer restored and turned into a Black Widow in 2002 (so says his remark that he wrote inside the cab.
Call me crazy, but I brought a Retrogamer with me with an interview of him inside and I got Archer to put a personal message to it for me. After all, didn't we all like IK+, dropzone and other games of his when we were young. Maybe some of us are still enjoing his classic and modern games, I know I am.
We stayed there for a few hours, awed at some very nice and rare games (Dropzone cab for instance). Man, how beautiful is Tempest, it's awesome. Next on my list? In the meantime we were also loading games into the van:
Fortunately, Olly and Rav had taken my two games from Rav to archer's place, saved us about 200 km's. Thanks guys.
At the end of the visit some of us bought additional game PCB's and/or artwork (I got a new Gravitar CPO and a Phoenix Marquee), and then we drove off, at about 5 PM. In the back 9 games!! On the way back we had bad luck because of traffic jam, hours waiting for the tunnel train,
and snow and rain.
The trip back took to Belgium took almost 12 hours, but fortunately Chris was waiting for us until 4.30 AM and offered us a very nice and warm bed, breakfast and a lot of coffee (also on the go).
We would like to thank you and your wife for your hospitality. So, on sunday morning we swapped some games (Timber out, Mario bros. in), and although we only slept for 4 hours, it was enough to travel the remaing distance back home on Sunday. At about 1 PM we arrived at Pieter's place, where we unloaded the Mario Bros. and the Moon Patrol. The van is almost empty again
Then I drove home all alone
where I arrived at 4 PM, and unloaded the cab with the last games
Black Widow of course has a special place in my house, I played it already quite a lot this evening. And it is not quite over yet, the two Star Wars games will be transported further into Europe in a few weeks.
So, that's it, another great weekend full of arcade experiences. A bit exhausting though, my wife told me that she could see me breath, so she knew that I was still alive, but I looked like a zombie.
And to finish the report, here is a picture which says it all, and I would like to thank Olly and Archer for a great weekend.
