June 13, 2018

I’m thinking of making Trucking Digest a regular weekly post on my blog in which I will condense the week’s driving into a rambling… I mean… concise report with some images from Europe and the US. The idea is that I can then write about other games and take part in photography challenges on the other days. So – Wednesday is Trucking Digest day and we’ll see how it pans out.

After last week’s Digest I parked up my Iveco Hi-Way in our Clermont Ferrand garage and blew the dust off the old Renault Magnum. I had to visit the local repair shop to bring the fittings up to the latest version of the game – a number of things having been lost when I removed the mods for the update. Here she is outside a Renault dealer complete with drivers nameplate and her own name displayed…
The observant among you will have spotted that I have a companion on board – Megan was hitching in Paris and has once again joined me on my European travels. We drove east to Warszawa and did some deliveries around north-east Poland before picking up a load of Tractors bound for Jönköping in Sweden. Here we are just outside Gdansk on our way to the ferry….

From Jönköping we picked up a load of Used Plastics for recycling in Oslo. Not a very pretty trailer but we did get to cross the Svinesund on this rather nice bridge that sits on the border of Sweden and Norway…

Having Megan on board means that, a bit like in American Truck, I need to find a hotel each night rather than crashing out in the cab! Here’s one in Oslo…

Over in America I’ve been clocking up the miles and slowly upgrading the Peterbilt 579. It’s a real joy to drive this basic duty cab again as it reminds me of my first drives in ATS when the game was new and still on a 1:35 scale. How different it all is now! I took a key step towards getting The Longest Journey achievement in World of Trucks on a Petrol delivery from Tucson to Bakersfield……passing 800000km of driving deliveries. I once worked out my real world mileage based on average distance per minute in game and I concluded that last year I drove around 24000 miles of which only 1000 were in my real life car!

I showed one of our European bridges earlier. Here’s a famous US bridge as it looks from the cab in the middle of the night……Yepp, you guessed it! – that’s the Golden Gate bridge and here are a couple of night shots from San Francisco…

There are some lovely mornings and evenings out on the road in ATS. Here I am making my way from Santa Maria to Bakersfield with a large item of agricultural equipment as the sun sinks low in the sky……it’s great as long as the sun isn’t in your eyes!

And here is my 579 in her current condition, parked up at the Bakersfield dealer……She’s almost as I want her to be and I have also upgraded the garage so very soon I expect to be buying another 579 from the dealer and hiring my first employee for Cal Republic 🙂