I thought that I was going to lose my mind, but I am finally less than one hundred jumps (92 to be precise) away from Waypoint 11. I will be visiting engineers and upgrading my fsd range as soon as I return to the bubble, that is certain.

I finally made it! When I reached Explorers Anchorage and sold my data, I was still a bit shy of reaching Elite, so I flew 100ly out and did some exploring in order to get enough data to finally reach my goal.

It is almost anti-climatic, especially since it will be months before I can get back to Founders World to enjoy my new system permit, but it is my first "Elite," so I am pretty pleased. Part of me wants to take the long road back to the bubble to start spending all of my new money, but I'm in all the way on DW2 and will see what the rest of this journey brings. I'm looking forward to our next community event.

I've left Polo Harbor and won't be seeing another station until I reach the new station near Sag A. Assuming that I don't have an incident with the black hole/neutron star that I hear is waiting for me up ahead, I should have enough credits worth of exploration data to sell by the time I get to the hopefully-completed station that I will raised up to Elite Explorer rank.

I'm wishing that I had stopped my bounty hunting earlier than I did, since I would have loved to have an engineered FSD drive or a Guardian booster. I'll deal with all of that after I make it back from Beagle Point.

Despite the long hours spent in Witchspace and scanning systems, the trip has been going smoothly since my near-death experience with the binary stars. I've managed to sell my exploration data at the last two stations I stopped at (Omega Mining and Rohini), which has done wonders for the amount of credits I have.

When I managed to land at the Conflux Delta Site, I ended up chatting with a friendly commander who seemed to be as pleased to encounter another friendly explorer as I was. We talked for awhile before he set off to visit some local points of interest while I decided to investigate the area in my Scarab. I found some materials and gathered logs indicating that someone had run into trouble with a neutron star somewhere nearby--I sure hope that I do not find that same sort of trouble once I leave for the next Waypoint.

I'm going to have another cup of coffee and start waking up my ship, since the next Waypoint will be announced in about 20 minutes and I want to be ready to set off as soon as I know where we're heading next. I'll probably detour to a station so I can sell my exploration data, unless we end up veering too far away for me to easily do so. Assuming that all goes well, I should have enough money saved up by the end of this expedition to buy a bigger ship that can jump farther than my current 34ly limit.

That was a rough set of jumps. I wasn't aware that there was a route other pilots were taking to the first waypoint, so I went my own way and headed toward Mammon. Once I sold star and planet data at Mammon, I continued on toward Omega Sector. About 40 jumps out, somewhere in the Sagittarius Gap, I jumped into my first binary system.

Having never encountered one before, I killed my speed and almost ended up killing myself. I'd never seen my temperature get above about 110% before, so when I saw that i had hit over 200% and alarms started going off, I panic-jumped out of the system. I took damage to multiple systems, but did my best to do some field repairs before heading on to Omega Mining. I made several million credits selling my exploration data, so I should be able to repair my ship before the rest of the Distant Worlds 2 fleet arrives.

I got lucky this time. I hope that my luck holds out.