Oh That It Should Come To This!

Old T-shirts can be guardians of some great memories but none the less, even if they are beloved working shirts, one day they reach the end of their time, as do we all.  That doesn't mean they are tossed in some rubbish bin then. Old vets can still be useful, if only as a cleaning rag, and the memories of the good times live on! 

Here is the short version of the epic journey that brought us together.

One last moment together before the transformation began.

The chosen theme for the 2001 HMGS Cold Wars convention was the American Rebellion (or Revolution or War of Independence if you prefer), broken down to the early years at Cold Wars, the Middle years at Historicon and the later years at Fall In!.  Since my duties at home and at work made Cold Wars the easiest one for me to get time off, that's the one I usually attended so early years it was. Luckily, that coincided with the most relevent part of the AR for me, Mongomery's attack on Quebec. 

Now it was only fairly recently that I had started the Little Wars Yahoo Group and 54mm had become my main scale, I decided to do a game based on the 1775 New Year's Eve assault. With a number of friends providing figures in addition to my own, I focused on coming up with toy soldier versions of the walls and houses and barricades etc. (Ever wonder why I use so many Christmas village houses on my table, esp before I painted over the snow?) Everything was set, two friends from Halifax were going to travel down with me.

So much for plans. As the departure date approached, reports of an impending mega-snowstorm in New England  began to threaten disaster. On the evening before we were due to leave, I decided to launch a preemptive drive. My friend Tom was good to go with an hour's notice but our 3rd passenger, we'll just call him X, didn't have a cell phone, or a land line, and wasn't home anyway, so we cruised about the streets till we spotted him, dragged him into the car, drove him to his rooms and gave home 30 minutes to shower, pack and join us. I was driving a little Chevy Sprint, a bit crowded for more than two even without the city of Quebec, including the cliffs that separate the Lower town from the Upper town. (btw...if you ever wonder how Wolfe got his army inc a couple of canons up a goat trail at l'Anse Aux Foulons, not to mention why the French would bring boatloads of supplies there when the main road was open, French maps and orders of the time show that there was already a wagon road there, where the road is today. The first wave just missed the proper landing spot. Serendipity.) This meant more boxes than usual and as a result, whoever's turn it was in the back seat, had to sit with a box full of terrain on his lap!  (Its only a 24 hour drive in all....) 

Hitting the road at maybe 8pm, we reached my forewarned parents, then living in a mobile next door to my brother in New Brunswick, and crashed from about 2 am until 6 am, then rose and carried on as the snow started to come down. By the time we neared Portland, the I95 was hubcap deep and we just barely managed to pull in to a motel. By morning, the snow had stopped, the road ahead was open and the road behind us was closed for two days. Phew! Carpe diem! 

By early afternoon we were in tshirts and visiting the  The Toy Soldier museum in Pennsylvania  (btw, if you ever make the chance and book an appointment, its worth a long drive to go visit for an hour or two or....). A few hours later we were booking in to the Lancaster host and a great convention followed.

ALLLLLRight, you sluggarts! Enough nostalgia. Get to work! There's a chain saw to clean.

As I recall the game was a good one with a close result and some memorable incidents but after more than a decade of life, games, and memories, the details are gone. Its a pity that it was in the very early days of digital cameras and cellphones and a VERRY busy convention with other games to run or play and I don't have even one picture of that Cold Wars or the game that was at the core of this story. 

Still, the memories live on in the shirt, and in me.