how I spent my Christmas vacation; Covenant Travel Network review

My husband came down with Covid a week before Christmas, so we were in quarantine for the holidays. I’ve had all three of my shots and my husband has had one, so our symptoms were relatively mild. My husband was achy and spent as much time sleeping as he could. I had a persistently scratchy throat, slightly achy lungs, and a noticeable decrease of stamina for reading stories or singing bedtime songs to the children. The kids had sniffles and some coughing, but otherwise seemed to be fine — no fevers, and completely normal behavior. We think the cat might have gotten it, too, because he was lethargic and sneezing for a few days.

My husband has long been a fan of the Wheel of Time series. Not having gotten into that series myself while I was a teenager/young adult, I used to say, somewhat flippantly, that maybe I’d read them while I was breastfeeding, if I ever had a biological child. Somehow, that didn’t happen this summer and fall. During the past couple of weeks, my husband watched the Wheel of Time TV series on Amazon Prime, and I got sucked into watching the last couple of episodes over his shoulder. He described the earlier episodes as being more like Peter Jackson’s treatment of Lord of the Rings… and the later episodes as being more like Peter Jackson’s treatment of The Hobbit. Naturally, then I had to find out for myself just how different the TV show was from the books. I read New Spring and Eye of the World with the baby either nursing or just sitting on my lap, while the older kids played with their Christmas toys or on the computer (they loved the Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar that my Mom always gets for me). I found myself sufficiently interested by enough of the characters that I might have continued on to The Great Hunt — except that by then I’d received a book I was much more interested in, Rhythm of War, as a birthday present from my husband. I am currently about a third of the way through that tome. Speaking of Brandon Sanderson books, before reading the Wheel of Time books, I read Cytonic, which I gave to my husband for his birthday a month ago, after he finally finished reading it.

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In Azeroth, Kateleina and Kaelyra have reached Renown 79 with the Necrolords and the Kyrian, respectively. They’ve also gotten their Covenant Sanctums as fully upgraded as I intend to do. So I guess it’s time to go do the 9.0 Campaigns for those Covenants. Then I suppose it will be back to their home Covenants and off to Korthia — and flying! — at last.

After getting all four Covenant Sanctums upgraded to level 3 Travel Network and level 2 Anima Conductor with the Treasure Box and World Quest reinforced, here is my personal ranking of the Travel Networks. The Kyrian Travel Network is the most useful because it is a true network, because it has points right on top of the Anima Conductor features, and because it has other points that are very conveniently located for other Bastion World Quests that I like to do. The Night Fae Travel Network is the next most useful; it has a point close to the Treasure Box and points close to some of the Ardenweald World Quests that I like to do — but for the Anima Conductor World Quest, as well as other Ardenweald World Quests that I like, there are conventional flight points that I find more convenient to use. The Night Fae Travel Network also has associated with it the Marasmius dailies, which give Night Fae characters an advantage for quickly collecting Anima. The Venthyr Travel Network I found to be much less useful. The Anima Conductor features are more easily accessed from conventional flight points. I only ever used two Venthyr Travel Network points — the Eternal Terrace mirror when “Secret Service” was up and the Feeder’s Thicket mirror when “Parasol Peril” was up. And the Necrolords Travel Network? Completely useless for getting to the stuff in Maldraxxus that I like or at least am willing to do.