Way Out in Timbuktoo

Murphy and I got lucky this week. (I sure didn't see that coming with Murphy, of all horses!) First, we fluted this Mangalarga Marchador mare:

We weren't so lucky as for her to have stellar stats to go with her stellar personality, but she was definitely special enough to retire to our ranch. Of the available rump art, I thought this leaf of Lorien (Lord of the Rings reference) looked best on her. In keeping with the leaf theme, I named her Liana after a kind of woody vine. I think Samoa, our Manga stallion retiree, is very pleased at this turn of events.

And now to the title event, our first visit to Timbuktoo Isle! Murphy and I were headed to Savanna Isle from the Plains Isle dock house, when out of the blue we found ourselves out in Timbuktoo instead. I knew little about the island, just that you can randomly end up there when you travel between islands, and that it is similar to Narner Isle in that it isn't on the map. 

As you can see, the island is shaped roughly like an X. It reminds me of an X chromosome. ;^)

The lone inhabitant of the island is the rowboat dude, MrWayfarer. I can't think about his name without that stupid Wayfair.com jingle playing in my head. 

As it turns out, you can only spend 15 minutes maximum on Timbuktoo before you are forcibly dragged back where you came from... I mean rescued. And if you want to go back early, MrWayfarer is game to row you there himself.

The island's sights didn't seem very unique to me. The marshy areas on the right arms of the X's were your typical marshy areas.

And the sandy left arms of the X are home to clusters of various rocks, which were sparkling with harvestable ore. Nothing I hadn't seen before, but we got to work and happily harvested it all.

We did see two unique things, though. The first was a meteorite, which as far as I know are usually limited only to the glacier isles. 

Our second unique find was this almost-hidden buried pirate treasure. I'm thinking it was just coincidence that it was so well-concealed, because the one other pirate treasure we found on the isle was out in plain sight. 

Once our 15 minutes were up, rescuers whisked Pepsi back to the Plains Isle dock house. I wonder if multiple players are ever stranded out in Timbuktoo at once, or if only one player can be there at a time? It didn't look like anybody had been there recently when we arrived.

My final piece of news is that the new APH stallion is named and tacked already! Meet Zenith in all his black, white, and blue glory. We tried various colors on him, but nothing looked as good as blue - I think we're all partial to blue on blue-eyed horses. So blue it was. We tried to jazz it up by going with blue and white rather than solid blue this time, at least.

Welcome to the herd, Zenith! <3