Thanks for the Magic

 2025 has flown by, as years tend to do, and another three seasons of Safari trips are in our rear view mirror. Mostly, a Safari season lasts ten weeks, but this year the second season was just seven weeks, making a total of 27 weeks, with 53 destinations including a two hour visit to the Mal Burns region on Craft grid. 

The memorial party for Mal Burns in October featured eulogies by a dozen of his friends.
Missed it? You can watch the event here on Youtube

Last Wednesday, talented pianist, and grid owner Marlon Wayne invited the Safari group over to Pangea to enjoy a live music event with lots of seasonal pieces. It was such a treat to hear the music and stop and think for a moment about the great year we've had in Opensim.

On sim Lappland, enjoying the party...
in RL Marlon plays a Steinway and the music he treated us to was divine.

Where did we go this year? HG Safari tours visited folk on Spacegrid, CCI grid, Kinky Haven, ArtDestiny Grid, Dismayland, SV3D grid, Bloodmoonpack, VVM, Candorsworld, Shipyards grid, Creanovale, Maze grid, Genesis RP Grid, Virtual Learning Village, Wyldwood Bayou,  Mobius, Friends Grid, Dorenasworld, Bubblesz, Newlifeitaly, Tenth Dimension grid, Counterearth, DWGrid, Kitely,  and a bunch of visits to OSGrid, Pangea, Wolf Territories Grid, Neverworld, Winxtropia, Craft, and Alternate Metaverse Grid. 

Risa, the sparkling Trekkie resort on ArtDestiny

We traveled back in time to medieval cities, went for a sail in a pirate ship, a flying saucer, a Viking longboat, (and a memorable bus)... we saw forests and cities, beach resorts, caves, parks, and galleries. 

Timbuktu by Tosha Tyran, on Craft Grid

We were in Moscow and Paris and Timbuktu, at the Nurburgring and Reykjavik, under the sea and in outer space, in Westeros and Hogwarts country, on rollercoasters and into volcanoes, and even saw heaven and hell. And lag.

On Westeros, James demonstrates his horsemanship

Part of the purpose of the Safari trips is to grid jump so generally speaking, each week we go to two different grids, and that can penalize the bigger grids with many great places for our crowd to visit. This year to redress a little bit the deficit felt in particularly by OSGrid, we went to a lot more of the destinations on 'the crossroads of the metaverse' than we generally do. 

Arte Erotica on OSGrid, curated by Vicky Logan

That allowed us to experience the uniqueness of OSGrid, where many regions are selfhosted so that, even though we're on a big grid, we often found ourselves on a quite small server, with varying levels of success - which is all part of the Safari experiment - how many angels can dance on the point of a pin before the whole thing crashes?

Safari arrives at Sybella on Ignis Fatuus grid

Many factual builds, the chance to visit rl places virtually, but also a lot of fantasy destinations were on the menu including the glorious Sybella, inspired by a game but expanded and made even more intriguing.

The flying Viking ship on Norge.

Above all, we traveled together.  Our hosts do an enormous amount of work to make their sims interesting, beautiful, and efficient and we so appreciate that. But it's going as a group, laughing together, making friends with new people who join us for the first time, or maybe just occasionally show up months or even years between one Safari and the next, and generally getting to share the joy of the creativity - that's the magic. Thank you all for being a part of it.
The next season of HG Safari begins on Wednesday January 7 at 12:00 Pacific time at our clubhouse

grid.hgsafari.org:58002  - hope to see you there!