General: The Treasures of Aht Urhgan

I finally managed to get my hands on two copies of the PS2 version of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion yesterday. I had pre-ordered from Amazon, but when it was still showing as "not yet shipped" on Thursday morning, and it had been released on Tuesday, I called an EB Games less than a mile from work. They had just got their PS2 copies and were in the process of seeing how many they had left over after their pre-orders were taken care of, and told me to call back in 30 minutes. I did so, and they had six left. It was lunchtime, so I hurried over to the store and bought two copies, then called my husband to tell him to cancel the Amazon order.

It took about two hours for our installations to complete, then we logged in and headed to Jeuno to turn in our testimonies for our boarding passes. We met up with Elboron in Jeuno, also in the process of getting ready to head to the new area. When the day changed, we talked to Faursel again and got our boarding pass, competing our first ToAU quest, The Road to Aht Urhgan.

We warped back to Windurst and used the OP teleport to get to Buburimu Penninsula and run to Mhaura. There were quite a few other adventures waiting for the next boat to Aht Urhgan, most of them seemed to be level 75. I think it's funny that I still feel like a "baby" adventurer at 71. I'll probably still feel that way at 75. The boat ride was uneventful, but it was pretty exciting to see the Al Zahbi/Aht Urhgan Whitegate skyline appear on the horizon.

It was already past my bedtime by the time we got off the boat in Aht Urhgan Whitegate, but I certainly couldn't simply log out and go to bed. We spent some time running around, talking to as many NPCs as we could. We bought all the maps from the vendor, picked up a bunch of quests, completed our first ToAU Mission (Land of Sacred Serpents, which was just a cutscene), and turned in our four invitations to Naja Salaheem for a new title (Wildcat Publicist) and a reward of an Imperial Mythril piece. Needing to get to bed, I checked Kiki into the quite luxurious rent-a-room in Whitegate and logged out for the night.

Since we're farming hippogryph feathers tonight in Cape Riverne in preparation for CoP 4-2, I won't get to explore any more until Saturday. They've sure added an awful lot of things to the game, and I'm really eager to unlock the new jobs, do lots of quests, get going on the missions, participate in Beseiged, and most of all, see what Assualt is like. There's really not a lot here for the under-50 crowd, but there's so much to do in the "old" game as well, that it really shouldn't be an issue for people.

My concern at the moment is travel. I would really like to have an easy way to get back and forth between Aht Urhgan and Windurst without needing to take the boat each time. With mog storage in Windurst, and the new mog locker in Aht Urhgan, I "need" to be able to access both with relative ease, unless I end up using the mog locker for things that are so Aht Urhgan-specific that I won't need them unless I'm there. Hopefully we'll discover easy two-way travel.