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Attendees:
John M Knight (& son Thomas)
Chris Leach (& son Ethan & daughter Kira)
Sandy Leach
Larry Pieniazek
Nik Pieniazek
Jason Spears
Overall Picture Directories:
Larry Pieniazek
Jason Spears
Report by Jason Spears
MichLUG was pleased to display at the Curious Kids' Museum in St. Joseph, MI (in sight of the beautiful Lake Michigan shore). This is the second year we have participated with the Museum during their creation contest and the first year that we helped judge the creations. Setup began at 7pm on Friday, April 16th and went on until almost 12:30am on Saturday. We decided to call it quits at this point, as we were pretty beat. Morning came quickly as we agreed to meet back at the Museum at 7am. Due to a little miscommunication we didn't actually get into the museum until quarter to eight. Time was at a premium as we had volunteered to help judge the contest. Judging turned out to be more difficult than expected, there were a ton of entries and trying to rate each one was a challenge. We were able to get all the layouts finished just before noon.
We have had larger crowds at most of our shows, but every person who did see the layout was there to see LEGO creations. The weather didn't help as Saturday and Sunday were the nicest St. Joseph has seen all year. We heard a lot of people say that the layout was far more than they expected. The usual questions were asked, "how many pieces, how long to build, how do you transport it all, etc." As a club we have been getting better about increasing the detail in our layouts and the crowds are noticing. Chris' trees, sidewalk lamps, streetlights and mailboxes all got comments. In the medieval layout, visitors got a chuckle out of the Evil Chickens and the guy riding his horse backwards. They also liked Jason's trees and the crowding of the village. In the Space display, John's NASA creations and Nik's BrikWars army were big hits. Nik's Sea Monkey's were featured with its own table. He fleshed out the display with a race, a base under construction, and many other interesting details.
We had two train wrecks during this show, both on Sunday. The first was caused when Larry's bullet train took out a tree, knocking it on to the outside track. When the cargo train came along the tree derailed it and it proceeded to take out a whole grove of cypress trees. The second was caused when Larry, tired and getting mischievous at this point, cranked the bullet train up to the fifth notch. It did fine for a while, but eventually got too much speed and tipped on a corner. The outside train happened to be on the same corner at the time of the tipping and was derailed as well. Both crashes were a source of much amusement to the kids. Fortunately, neither crash took long to clean up from nor were any bricks harmed.
The Museum was very happy with our layouts and asked us back for next year. They were especially pleased with Jason's model of the Museum itself, which he started Thursday night and finished just a bit before setup on Friday. Everyone had a great time and we said that we would be delighted to show again. A special thanks goes out to David Kohrman and Scott Sanburn, both of whom dropped things off at my house (buildings and tables respectively), which helped make this show possible.
Movies
One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six.
Town/Train
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Layout Details:
Layout Pictures:
Castle
Space
Sea Monkeys
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