PIRATES: Oak Island Treasure: A New Playing Field and Burying Pirate Booty - Pt 1

By God, if I don't start getting out the toys and play ima gonna burst!

The Cave - which I'll be calling The Room of Requirements cuz that's what it reminds me of - is no longer suitable for setting up my playsets or toys and messing with them. Why? Wellll, my Milwaukee North Western train layout has pretty much become a permanent thing as it is now a permanent fixture on the board I used to use for setting up playsets and toys. Although I haven't posted much about it lately, trust me, it's seen a lot of activity this year! Fun stuff too: locos, and  sets I haven't run in years, Hershey's trains, and M&M's trains, and lots of other trains have all been running the tracks. Currently there's an M&M's train and a nice consist of Menard's flat cars running the two loops.

So, what'll I do now? Well I figured that the 4'x6' board set up in the living room and used for last year's Christmas layout might as well be put to use a bit early. Only now, it's been placed on folding metal saw horses to raise it up some. Part of what drove this was my grand daughter asking me if I was going to do a Halloween set-up. And as I said earlier, the layout in the garage is getting harder and harder to swap themes. Also, she just doesn't like going out in The Room of Requirements all that much. It was logical to set the board up and use it for as many activities as I could fit in. We don't get company over to the house except for my grand daughter's friends so moving the couch to another wall to accommodate the board is no biggie. As a fatter-of-mact, I may even get rid of one of the couches to make room for other stuff!

Eventually I want to add some skirting to the table, but this how it is for now. The table was painted the same blue I used for the train layout backdrops. This way I can use it to stage boats on as you'll see in the upcoming photos.

Oak Island Treasure

And now to the point of the post. For my first set-up, it was a no-brainer to grab some of the pirate toys featured lately here on the blog. I pulled out a few of the Marx repop figures, the rowboat from the Haunted Hull set, and an MPC treasure chest and placed them on some of my leftover train layout scenery pieces. I have about four of five of these which come in awfully handy when setting up toys. The inspiration for the posts' title came of course from the History channel's "The Curse of Oak Island". I've enjoyed watching that show - albeit on an on-again/off-again basis - for years now. Pirates burying treasure is a time honored theme and the figures that come in all these sets are perfect for it. To that end - Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Here's the basic set-up. A couple of landforms, and some figures. I used sky blue foamcore board as a backdrop for now until I can get something a bit more permanent. BTW, the color rendition on my camera sucks. It doesn't like the color blue and more often than not, makes it appear gray.

That iguana to the far left came in a job lot of pirates and I like it - it makes a nice addition to these scenes

I don't know what that poor guy did to deserve this but I'm fairly certain he won't survive this!

Personally, this is my favorite shot. What do you think guys?