warhammer world- er... i mean nottingham

After our Belgium road trip, it was off to England. Before going to London, we made a trip up to the city of Nottingham. It was a very cute city with lots of friendly people, but the city wasn't the reason we'd come. Andrew is a big Warhammer fan, and Nottingham is where it's headquartered. It is also were they have Warhammer World, a place devoted to the fans of Warhammer. There you can drink Warhammer beer, play Warhammer games and go through a museum of Warhammer. We spent the whole day there, with Andrew geeking out while Maggie worked in the Bugman's Bar (a place for the spouses of Warhammer geeks to amuse themselves).

It was a Saturday, so the place was full of gamers playing Warhammer on fifty some tables. In the museum, there were well painted version of their minis, but also giant dioramas, some with over five thousand minis in them. It was quite impressive and Andrew spent hours perusing the museum and taking pictures.

We walked along the canal from the city of Nottingham to Warhammer World.

Andrew outside of Warhammer World.

Some amazingly well painted Space Marines in the museum.

A giant diorama with 5,500 minis in it.

One tiny portion of the above diorama.

Nottingham is also the city of Robin Hood, and as we learned, the city of caves. There are hundreds of man-made caves dotting the area. The surrounding geography is an easy-to-cut limestone and until the eighteen hundreds, if you had a shovel, you could dig yourself a home, a cellar, or even a bowling alley. It is also home to the oldest bar in England, the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. It's rumored to have been built around 1100 as a place for pilgrims to stop before heading off on the Crusades. It too is carved into the limestone, as well as being supposedly haunted. It has a toy-sized galleon that hasn't been cleaned in three hundred years because the first three people to clean it died in quick and horrible ways. The galleon is now surrounded in plexiglass so no one else can clean it, but it looked to have a few hundred years of dust on it before the covering was put on.

Andrew enjoying a beer in a carved out room in the Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem