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In both our projects it is time to make a decision about garages and employing staff. At this point there is a dilemma for the company operator – ie You! Do you upgrade your existing headquarters or do you buy a second garage elsewhere? To my mind there are two ways of looking at this and I’ll explain my thinking along with the thoughts from the Trucker community.

Upgrading your garage will cost 180K in Euros or Dollars – you do it by clicking on the upgrade button hiding in the image of the garage on the top left of the screen. What this will do is unlock two more garage slots allowing you to have another two vehicles based there. So where’s the dilemma? Well, if you choose instead to buy a new garage elsewhere instead of upgrading your existing one you get three slots at the new garage which still only costs you 180K. So you either have a total of three or four garage slots depending on which option you take. Many members of the community feel that getting that extra slot for the same money is always the way you should go. I think it depends on how realistic you are trying to play the game. Companies usually expand in their home area first before buying additional premises elsewhere, not least because of the logistical and communication complexities that multi-location operations introduce. So, in my own profiles I’ve always gone for the upgrade option and that is what we’re going to do in our Lone Star Project over at Flagstaff. But first we’ve got to drive there.

After the last job I parked up in a motel near Bakersfield rail depot for a good night’s sleep. In the morning I found a load of Construction Offices going to Flagstaff but to collect them I had to run light into Bakersfield itself. Then we were off along Route 58 passing a large trailer park along the way…
Now I’ve been slightly misleading you largely because I want to keep the two games in sync for this stage of our play-through journey. You actually don’t need to drive to your garage to upgrade it. You can access the details screen for any garage you own at any time and upgrade it. The drive to Flagstaff is only to mirror a drive that we are going to do in France. And the reason we need to do a drive in France is that I am going to follow the community logic in our Build a Company project and buy a second garage elsewhere. And, to buy a garage you have to visit its location 🙂

Our headquarters garage is in Lyon so I think we need a new garage in a different area of France. Lille or Reims might be a good choice being close to the northern border. However, I really fancy one of the cities along the Atlantic coast. In my main profile I have a garage in Nantes and it is one of my favourites for visiting (when available loads and time permit). Alternatives I considered back then were La Rochelle and Bordeaux. This time I think we’ll go with Bordeaux. So – decision taken I picked up a load of Schweppes beverages and off we went…
…picking up the A89 on the outskirts of Clermont Ferrand. You can read a lot of fascinating information about the A89 here and see images of its service stations and structures – some of which are reproduced in game. I will try to share them with you over time but not on this run because it’s late afternoon and it will be night by the time we reach Bordeaux.

And here we are pulling in to Geodis…

I like sprawling nature of Bordeaux as depicted in ETS2. There are several industries offering a variety of cargoes. It also adds a degree of urgency to things when you arrive with very little ‘driving’ time left and you’re nowhere near a rest point. The map below illustrates the point. The blue triangle near the bottom is our truck at the Geodis depot and the red line is the route I need to take to get to the garage that I want to buy……and I’m going to have to be quick because I’m almost out of hours and I could soon start incurring Sleep Avoidance fines! Fortunately, the traffic was light in the middle of the night and I made it before the Gendarmerie started fining me 🙂 And this is our new three slot garage in Bordeaux…

Our next task in both projects is to earn the money to buy our next truck and in France we’ll then be looking to hire our first employee. I was intending to keep both games in line until we could buy those vehicles but… well I’ll tell you about that in the next post 🙂