Bonjour à tous,
Je ne résiste pas à vous copier ici l'annonce de nos amis italiens avec un premier évenements ASL ouvert à l'international :
Dear Aslers,
the Italian ASL Forum (http://www.freeforumzone.com/viewforum.aspx?f=33105) is proud to invite you to the ASL Winter Gathering 2005! Ever dreamed about meeting this grey ELR 1 Italian guys? Always wanted to know the real face of your VASL opponent? Did you always thought that ASL has still to reach Italy? Well, this is time to give an answer to these compelling questions!
The event will not be a tournament, but just a free-gaming experience with no prizes, a tried a trust formula that will guarantee a lot of fun to all the attendees! With some pre-planning regarding scenarios and opponents, one can conceivably squeeze a large amount of gaming time in the four days of the event. Moreover, there will be NO registration fee, and we were able to get a really good price for rooms and food.
After this brief introduction, I would present some technical details:
The event will take place in December, from Thursday 12/8 early in the afternoon to Sunday noon 11/12/2005. 12/8 is national holyday in Italy (as well as in Austria, Spain and Portugal).
The location for the Gathering is the Hotel Cangrande (www.hotelcangrande.it), located 20 km east of Verona, one of the most beautiful cities in Italy, so you could also have a visit there before/after the meeting, or in Soave, the wonderful medioeval town we will be in.
The hotel is easily reached by car, being just a couple of kilometres away from the "Soave ? San Bonifacio" motorway exit on the highway "A4 Milan - Venice". Verona is at the centre of a net of highways connecting Milan, Venice, Bologna and the Austrian border (Brenner Pass).
You can also reach the Valerio Catullo International Airport near Verona, again 20 km from the hotel, and then reach the hotel by taxi, bus or train (the connection are very good and it takes less than 1 hour). Given some time to organize ourselves (and al little luck on your part!), we could pick you up at the airport to the hotel and back, depending on our schedule, here we obviously need some planning.
The hotel website, www.hotelcangrande.it, has an English section and contains further indications on how to reach it ("Reach Us" section): the map has a zoom option that opens up a window with a better detail on the highway. Remember, whichever direction you are coming from, exit at "Soave", then proceed for about 600 meters toward Soave and turn right onto SR11 for 1600 meters. Here you are, at Hotel Cangrande! (Viale Del Commercio, 28 - Soave).
The hotel provides double rooms, at these prices: 45 euros for double room single occupancy and breakfast, or 65 euros for double room double occupancy and breakfast (i.e., 32.5 euros per person, a very convenient price in our opinion!). Just name ?ASL ITALIA? when you book.
We will have a conference room just for the gathering and gaming of about 90 square meters (called foyer), with no additional charge.
Regarding food, you will have a plethora of solutions: a cold or warm buffet (if you are the kind of guy that never wants to lift his head from the table) at 4-5 euros, you could eat at the hotel's restaurant with prices going from 10-11 euros to... whatever you can eat, and, lastly, there are a lot of typical restaurants in the nearby, to have a flavour of good Italian food.
At the present status, about 20 gamers will attend the event during the four days, and the first pre-arrangements regarding games to be played are in progress. Some of us will always be available to fill up holes in your schedule with gaming, so you will almost always find someone to play with even without pre-agreements. Of course, we will help you in arranging your games, just contact me at aslgheba@libero.it and I will do my best to find you an opponent (and possibly for a scenario meeting your likes). Another option is to have an Italians-World match, maybe on an historical map and with multiple players teams... This is up to our imagination! There is also the possibility of a Team Tank Rumble, depending on the availability of a referee and of a reasonable number of players. We want to stress the fact that there will be no tournament events, just free games all along: this is not an ideological position of any sort, just the way the event came out to be.
In conclusion, you can always have a look at the ?Overseas Friends? section of the Italian ASL forum (http://www.freeforumzone.com/viewdiscussioni.aspx?f=33105&idc=11), the main place for discussion and news on this event, or you can always mail me at p.cariolato@cariolato.net
Snake eyes and my best regards
Paolo Cariolato