Today is a very exciting day! I just received my HMS Surprise kit in the mail. I had ordered it back in May 1st, and here it is already May 14th. I guess I’m used to the instant gratification of Amazon Prime’s 2 day shipping, lol… Although I do have to admit that I contacted John Garcia over there at Model Expo about the status of this order yesterday via email and he replied back that they were waiting for their shipment and that mine will go out right after they get it. I’m assuming he was talking about the shipment from Mamoli which happens to be in Italy.

I was reading that the Mamoli factory in had a fire. I read about it on this blog over at Shipmodeler.wordpress.com so apparently sometimes these Mamoli models are hard to come by.

I don’t know about all that because Model Shipways gave me a $150 dollar discount so the price of the model was $349.00. My absolute upper range that I will spend on a model is at $500.00 so this was well within my price range.

So, if you’re following me, be prepared for me to go into the the smallest of minutiae as I’m building the model. 🙂