Despite myself, I’ve been getting back into World of Warcraft. I’ve been messing around in Everquest 2 recently which is fun but altogether too serious and, well, lacking a je ne sais quoi. With the recent introduction of character transfers in WoW, I’ve moved my primary toon - Mordred the Undead Warlock - to a PvE server. One of the problems I think I had was that although I enjoyed PvP at times, getting ganked when trying to do missions was hindering my progress and generally annoying me. So Mordred - or Mordredd as he is now known thanks to some upstart creating a character with the same name a couple of days before I transferred - is levelling nicely, thank you very much.

The first WoW expansion pack, “Burning Crusade”, is being released in November (allegedly) and adds a whole new continent to the world of Azeroth, as well as two new races, professions and some controversial class balancing. The new continent is accessed by going through the Dark Portal which currently stands in the The Blasted Lands zone. It’s a high end area dominated by level 60 monsters and all sorts of nasties none of which would give second thought to crushing Mordredd in a blink of an eye and using his bones to remove the toe-jam from their trainers. But, figuring that I hadn’t seen this area and that it might be worthwhile; so I took a day trip there.

It doesn’t look much, I know but then I was still quite a way back from it on account of it being guarded by things which make even an undead master of death, decay and demonic destruction have second thoughts.

Daytripping is fun. I’ve done it before (and tried to video it too but hadn’t realised that Fraps only allows you to do five seconds at a time). My first day trip was with a level 1 Orc warlock and, in nothing but my undies, I ventured out of Durotar and caught the boat to Booty Bay.

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Incidentally, Hulda Crooks was a famous “adventurer”, famous for her octagenarian exploits. You can read more about her here. Getting to Booty Bay, however, is not that much of a biggy as it’s pretty much run from Durotar to Ratchet through The Barrens and then boat to Booty Bay. However, remaining a level 1 toon is tricky - the xp I earned was all exlporation bonuses for new zones. I’m tempted to try getting a low level Night Elf to Ironforge or, perhaps even the Undercity. Suggestions are welcome from any WoW players out there.