Doll Diaries: Plum Prestige is Ours

We somehow made it through the spring festival and the first few days of May without purchasing a fourth equine or a second canine companion. Well, done, sisters! <3 I think it would have been much more difficult to resist had we not stumbled upon a YouTube video indicating that several breeds will soon be on a steep sale at some sort of bazaar. I do not know if their information is accurate, but Star Stable's news does indicate a bazaar is coming the third week of May, just in time for Mom's birthday...

Our daily participation in the festival, often past our bedtime, paid off. We ended up earning enough spring tokens to take home everything we wanted. We even had a few left over, which was awesome.

This is the "plum prestige" dressage set. (Nice, whoever was in charge of naming this.) The coat was near the bottom of our want list, but we'll be set now if we ever want to be really fancy. Sadly, only Desertdash can wear the saddle pad, saddle, and bridle. We especially like the breeches and boots - they're going to get a lot of use.

This is the "blazing glory" set. Funny how the shade of yellow is similar to Clara's skin tone, and the shade of brown is quite close to Desertdash's coat. (Again, only he can wear the pad, saddle, and bridle.) We didn't realize tall patterned socks with short boots was a thing in the equestrian world, but it is on Star Stable, at any rate. You can't tell here, but Clara's gloves have little gold horseshoes on them that match the saddlebag. =)

Here is the premier pink set, minus the pink and red plaid saddle pad that doesn't fit any of our three equines. The bridle only fits Desertdash, but we will likely use the boots and saddle on Tigertin quite a bit. We don't care for the red pants with this ensemble, so you probably will never see them paired in a screenshot again, ha ha.

Here are Clara and Frostflight in full Bulldogz gear. (Sorry about the bows, buddy.) From what we've gathered, the Bulldogz are the Bobcats' rival riding group, but we haven't actually met them yet in the storyline. This stuff could come in handy on St. Patrick's day, if nothing else.

And finally, here are Clara and Tigertin sporting full Bobcats gear. I think Tigertin likes it, even if is a lot going on with her stripes.

I wanted to spend all of the Jorvik shillings we made during the festival on stockpiling hay. It's pricy (takes at least 2 regular activities to fund feeding a single horse each day), it never goes bad, and it's going to go more and more quickly the more horses we add. We did spend some on hay, but my sisters really liked some of the only-around-for-the-festival gear for sale. I didn't have the heart to fight them on it when they were being so good about resisting more horses and pups. So, now we have matching emerald and sapphire saddle blankets, leg wraps, and saddle bags.

Here's the sapphire version. The pads fit the other equines too, though they don't look as nice because they don't go down as far down their barrels.

Here are some fond looks back on our last few days on the red string trail.

Hello, sheep!

enjoying a picnic with an NPC

enjoying another glitchy picnic by ourselves

aww, baby fox!

a dark, rainy ride

We will kind of miss bringing the wandering animals back to the petting booth. Partway through, though, the cows and sheep got glitchy and would no longer move more than a few feet before getting stuck. Then, as we'd ride around the area, we'd keep getting distracting messages that "it looks like the animal went back where I found it." Annoying.

the mini donkeys were my favorites

We will miss the payouts from the daily races and dressage trials too, but it is a relief not to feel obligated to cram these activities into our week nights anymore. It's an even bigger relief not to have so much incentive to join the global competitions - we do not have the skills or the practice for them to be enjoyable. We're always just happy when we make it through. (Not a given: we got disqualified once for getting lost and taking too long, then got disqualified a different time for accidentally going through a checkpoint the wrong direction.)

We were super proud of ourselves for managing a 5th place once last weekend: our new personal best with a large group

We also gave each other major high fives when we finally completed the quest line for the festival. The first part involved stealing a box of fireworks and then sneaking past a ridiculously numerous, close-packed group of GED guards while we were on horseback with the box. It was no picnic. Even worse was racing back to Alex and Linda with said box while being pursued by Sabine on her insanely fast horse Khaan. We lost count of how many attempts that took before we finally succeeded!

All but one firework fell out of the box on this whirlwind ride. We gathered them up, but then Sabine arrived and nabbed them after insulting us all (even called Desertdash a "bus," as I recall), intending to set them off and freak out the horses at the festival.