Vacation Hobby Haul

Last week the family and I, along with Tim and his wife, spent an amazing week in Southern California for our annual family vacation.  We spent several days at the beach and going to various attractions around the LA area.  As usual, Tim and I had to take some time to hit a couple of our favorite game/hobby stores in the area - The War House and Brookhurst Hobbies.  You can read about Tim's experiences here.

As usual, I went with a rather large list of items for existing or new projects.  Mostly I am looking for items that are hard to find locally but I do have my eye out for just about anything interesting.  This year I really looking for lots of Flames of War items.  I have learned that Battlefront has a bit of a supply issue so if you see a FoW item in a shop and you want it, buy it.  Your local shop might not get it for months, if at all.

The first stop was The War House in Long Beach.  This is a cool little hole-in-the-wall shop that looks like it has been around for a 100 years.  It has an interesting mix of old and new products.  It is the kind of place that you have to spend some time in to dig through all the stuff.  But that is time well spent if you can dig out one of the gems.  This year I scored a Battlefield in a Box set BB103 Normandy.  This terrain set was originally released in 2008 to support the (then) new Normandy hard back books (or maybe it was the soft back books, I can't remember).  This set contains three large pillboxes, a couple of AA pits and lots of anti-tank obstacles.  The original price was $90 and they tend to go much higher on eBay when you can find them.  It appears that these items are not available at all from BF anymore.  I got this at the original 2008 retail price for an unopened, but shelf worn, box.

The next stop was Brookhurst Hobbies in Garden Grove.  I have been going to BH for many years and I must say it just keeps getting better and better.  I did find a bunch of items I was looking for but I have already spend a big chunk of the budget so I had to keep some composure.  I picked up a box of Perry Miniatures plastic British 8th Arny figures.  I have been waiting for a long time for these and I am excited to start working on them.  I also picked up a 4Ground 15mm building.  I have been really interested in these for a while and I was glad to find a 15mm building.  They had lots of the 28mm but very few of the 15mm.  I also picked up a box of Plastic Soldier Company Panthers for my Kursk project.  I actually need two boxes but I will get the rest locally.  The final item was a Battlefront P-38 for my mid-war Americans.  You can use this for late war but to me the P-47 is THE late war ground attack plane for the Americans.

I must say I am pretty happy with this trip even if I didn't bring back LOTS of stuff.