A day late but hopefully not a dollar short! In the previous digest I predicted that the community would achieve the goal of 500000 deliveries for the Operation Big Sur event sometime on Saturday. I was wrong – I’d failed to take into account the Football World Cup and the continuing involvement of six European Countries in the quarter finals on Friday and Saturday. Despite the event being located in California, a very high percentage of those taking part are drivers from all over Europe. The football action decimated the number of participants – leaving the smaller community of US and Asian drivers to carry the flag! The full community was back in action on Sunday and finally completed the event late on Monday night. Given the unforeseen ‘issue’, to complete so many deliveries in the two-weeks that it took was a fantastic community achievement.
Many drivers did more than the 15 deliveries required to get the World of Trucks achievement. I personally carried out 58 deliveries for the event and there were a few ‘positioning’ deliveries too. My total in-game mileage for the two weeks was 27734. In real world terms that means I drove around 1380 miles – which is around 300 more than I drove in my car in the whole of last year!
Now all that driving has come at a price. I injured my left knee in a fall quite a few years ago and it took another bash when our vacuum cleaner decided to trip me a couple of years ago. Driving Silver Dollar and Midnight Cruiser with their manual gearboxes has stirred up my knee and made it very sore. So I was glad to swap back to Purple Rain II with her automatic gearbox for the last few deliveries and rest my clutch pedal leg! I’m taking suitable arthritis and pain-killing medication to get things back under control. But it goes to show the hazards involved in computer gaming – which often show up as tendonitis in the hands. It’s ‘fun’ getting a sports injury sitting in your chair 😉 Fortunately, the real world car I bought in April to replace our old one is also an automatic – was that a prescient decision? Anyway, here’s Purple Rain II doing my final delivery of the Event – returning a large digger to the company that leased it to the highways agency.
I was going to write some bits about up-coming changes in SCS Software’s truck sims but I’ve probably run out of time this evening. I’ll aim to cover those in next Wednesday’s Trucking Digest. Keep the Bugs off your Bumper and the Flies off your Glass! 😉
Images from Finchley 