Bev’s retreat

Beverly Ultsch made a place as lovely and tricky as herself.

Her retreat, as she calls it, is a beautiful mix of landscapes and natural wonders conveying all the emotions the owner wants to fill your heart with.

An ideal tropical beach comes complete with its palm trees slowly swinging under a soft breeze, dolphins graciously playing in the distance while you lounge on a white carpet of soft sand, the crispy blue ocean laying its foamy tide at your feet.

Walk along the shore, pass the pony race track, yes, you pony players are going to enjoy this place for countless sweaty hours, and enter the thick colored wood at the bottom of the cliff. Right in the middle, an old and huge tree has a ladder resting against its tortuous trunk. Climb it and reach the secret platform among the branches. Bring your own chair and enjoy the song of the birds, the sweet melody of the wind and the regular moaning of the waves licking the shore beyond the trees.

The ruins at the top of the cliff will wrap your heart with a strange melancholy. Bare arches standing in the wind, ancient walls resisting the assaults of time offer the harsh beauty of their stones to the broken cries of the ravens. Bats abound too, they guard the grave which gloomy tombstone is just waiting for your name to be carved in.

Not far from the cliff a lighthouse proudly pierces the sky, planted on an island which imposing rocks conceal more than one secret.

There’s definitely much more to see there and much more to do. Beverly is an expert at planning and creating some evil traps and she had the time of her life carefully hiding the most dreadful fruits of her imagination among the gracious shapes and the beautiful angles of her sim.

One has to be extremely careful there. This lovely path could lead you to some dark place where no one will ever find you.

Beverly truly managed to give shape to a sharp expression of beauty reflecting the gorgeous light she keeps inside like a perfect cage lost in the middle of the ocean.

Pay a visit to the strange wonderland she built and try not to become its permanent guest !

/me grins

Bare Rose Tokyo

Okay okay, I am pretty sure that most of you already know this place but, hey, there maybe some newbie around who never heard of it so lets go. Most of the items crammed into the clothing file of my inventory come from the shop Bare Rose Tokyo.

 This more often than not heavily crowded fashion mall offers an unique and vast collection of outfits. Bare Rose fashion is colorful, highly imaginative and definitely exquisitely crafted. Whatever your style is you won’t leave this place empty handed: casual, goth, fantasy, sci fi or Japanese traditional, all genres collide and mix so just to be sure that what you are going to wear won’t be seen anywhere else.

I never bought anything there more than 180 lindens, often less than that and every outfit came into more than one colour and was loaded with highly detailed sculpted props. Yes, definitely the place where one can afford quality without smashing her piggy bank into pieces.

Roma

Roma has been celebrated as one of the most interesting and beautiful sim of sl, a forum and even sites are devoted to the making and the history of this unique place.

This sim will take you to a journey through time and will let you discover this ancient city at your own pace.

Explore, shop and pray as you wander along its finely recreated paved streets, enter the temples and bow in front of the huge statues of gods, visit the boutiques and learn what all their highly detailed and crafted tools were used for, take a rest in one of the numerous and lovely gardens and let your mind follow the song of the fountains.

 

Climb the Trajan Column to get a fantastic view of the Forum or reach the top of the Colosseus protecting the harbor, try to pet the lions waiting in the cages next to the Coliseum, become a book worm in the Library of Alexandria or simply take a well deserved break in the Baths of Caracalla.

Most of the famous monuments of the city have been rebuilt for your viewing and exploring pleasure but Roma is also a rp sim and you’ll find all the necessary informations to be part of this fantastic experience.

You can even get your own place there as various homes are available in the residential district of the city, all waiting for you to get in wearing your sandals and your favourite toga.

 

And if you feel like exploring some more, just leave the city and take the road to the port of Ostia. The countryside is beautiful even if you have to walk through the cemetery where you’ll have to decipher the epitaphs Romans loved to ornate their tombs and mausoleums with so curious travelers could benefit from the precious post mortem pieces of advices they felt like leaving them.

Reach the top of the mountain to visit the Cybele and get a glimpse at your future or the cave of Lupercale where you will behold the famous wolf who fed and raised Remus and Romullus the founders of Roma.

The port of Ostia is as finely made as the capital itself and lets its ancient walls face the sea while ships of beautiful colors just wait for you to get on board.

Roma was not built in a day and a day won’t certainly be enough if you really want to enjoy all the treasures concealed within the antique stone walls of this fantastic sim.

Therefore, MACTE ANIMO and leave these dull and grey times of ours to pay an unforgettable visit to a past made for your pixel eyes only.

The gardens of Da Vinci

Voltek knows the best places.

The other day she took me to a lovely sim, the gardens of Da Vinci in the Akepa region.

You really feel like entering a Renaissance painting, stepping into a quiet maelstrom of warm colours and artistically crafted shapes, a landscape made of high peaks raising above the ocean, stairs abruptly climbing the rock to some ancient ivory gazebo whith columns of an antique beauty bathed by the orange wings of the sun.

The white towers of castles reach the sky while, down the mountains, bridges born in sculpted marble cross the sea, leading to the colourful peace of some hidden shore where you and your loved one can relax and cuddle or take a slow romantic boat ride.

If you enjoy more privacy, you can always climb the giant tree and go hide in the house nesting at the top, concealed by its golden branches and forget about time while lost in contemplation.

A large white feather will take you for a tour of the whole sim but other flying devices, once created by Da Vinci himself, just wait for a pilot to take off and slide over the white fingered waves of the ocean caressing the rock.

If you want to escape the sun, just dive into the ocean, explore the ruins half buried in the sand while fishes of extraordinary shapes and colours gracefully dance around you and, attracted by the long painfully sweet calls of the giant whales in the distance, go watch these behemoths breathtaking ballet.

Feeling like boldy going where no one has gone before ? take the spaceship and fly to Mars. This impressive trip will have you wave goodbye to our blue world, travel through the stars before landing on the red planet with its massive ranges of blood coloured mountains and deep canyons.

The gardens of Da Vinci let technology embrace the past and nature flirt with your senses.

Out of lag and out of drama, there is still hope.

 

Avaria

Fed up with subs who drop on their knees on first sight and silently wait for you to fumble into their menu, with  cold and gloomy gothic mansions filled with poseballs toys and with irritating lag waves preventing you from chaining your loved one to the wall of your favourite patio ?

Well I know you don’t actually but let’s take a break in the bdsm rush and go breath some fresh air in one of the most beautiful sim SL has to offer.

 Grendel’s Children, also known as Avaria is an extraordinary ride into pixel wilderness.

 You will arrive in the shopping area where you’ll take the time to look at their wide selection of exquisitely sculpted and animated animal avatars. Ever wished to become a spider, a dodo bird, a fish, a lion or a dragon ? from the tiniest critter to the largest creature, a wide range of species just wait for you to put their skin, scales, feathers and wings on.

 Then you will jump through one of the open spaces in the wall and drop in Avaria, the continent below.

 A quiet lake in the depths of which ancient and mysterious ruins call for exploration, a prehistoric swamp of intricate trees, branches and roots silently cutting out the deep green of the giant leaves and the infinite plains surrounding everything, planted with rocks and mesas, wounded by deep orange canyons, quiet and fearful, an outback of solid beauty wrapped by the wind and the call of some distant animal.

 If you are ready for some action, you can also join the Avarian Expedition, get the basic toolkit in the shop and, with your scythe, your pickaxe and your backpack ready, start to roam the land to look for natural resources that you can trade or craft at the Kobold’s village in order to get some new material or even new pets !

 But you can also just sit in the tall grass under the thick arms of a baobab tree and enjoy the sounds and colours of the Avarian night watching a dragon flying in the distance or a lonely lion resting on a rock.

 Even SL time stops there.