The cat was there again. She had slipped down from upstairs sometime in the night, and when the driver came down in the morning and switched on the light, there she was, lying right on his truck seat, this cheeky little lady, bold as anything. He caught her this time, he had proof. He even tried to show his visitor, but by then she was already gone, already vanished back upstairs.

And of course, once she was up there, the two of them were screaming and starving, absolutely starving, even though he had checked and every single cat bowl was still full. How do you beg for full bowls? That was the question of the morning, and there was no answer to it. He had a bigger problem to solve anyway.

He had to find somewhere to stay overnight once he had picked up his trailer, and of course there was nothing nearby again. He was somewhere in Texas, closing in on the last few scraps of the state map he had not yet covered, and Texas was a disaster. He was at 97. 66 percent discovered, and he had been driving for two hours for 0.

2 percent of it. Incredible. Unbelievable. Two hours, 0.

2 percent. He had started the morning over at the SpaceX grounds, out near Musk’s place, and now he was heading toward NASA to pick up his cargo. There was the trailer up ahead. Finally.

Time to get started. He thought through the route while he maneuvered, muttering about whether to drive around this way or that, whether to grab those two scraps over there, whether it would be smarter to swing around the top. He had a driving-time problem, he explained to Martin, who had joined him for the morning. There was nowhere nearby where he could stay overnight, and that was a real pain.

He could pull into this spot and work his way around from there each day, that might work. There were a few little scraps left over here, those would work out fine too. He would really like to take those with him. Around here also fit quite well, although driving around up top almost sounded better.

There was another rest stop up there where he could pick up the whole thing in one go. Oh boy. But he could not, it was a bit stupid. Actually, yes, he could grab those two scraps here.

Getting Texas to 100 percent was a total disaster. The driving itself was not helping. The damage calculation in this game was so nonsensical it was unbelievable. Last time he swapped trucks, he had damage on that corner, damage on that corner, damage on that corner, and somewhere he had driven through a roundabout and picked up damage for no reason that anyone could name.

Then you pull into the service station for maintenance and it hands you a bill for 86 euros, and you think, okay, what did it actually do? Rubbed some polish on the paint and everything is fine. The damage alert that popped up on screen did not work right either. The real kicker was when it reported normal wear and tear as damage, because it was not 14 percent damage, it was mostly wear, and the rest was covered by insurance anyway.

It was the same in ETS2, he told Martin. He got bills of 70 or 80 euros there too, after it showed damage three or four times that you had no idea how you got, because you drove around a curve somewhere and suddenly there it was. Heaven knows if there was a screw lying on the ground that hit the underside of the wheel. He had no idea what that was about, but it kept reporting damage, and then later, when you went to fix it, there was nothing.

Absolutely nothing. But fine, whatever. He could afford it. In ETS2 he was sitting on 1.

2 billion, believe it or not, so it did not really bother him. The roundabouts were a bigger problem. In a two-lane roundabout, you stayed in the outer lane and the whole thing worked very, very well. But if you had a car behind you that did not take the first exit but the second instead, then it wanted to switch to the outer lane after the first exit, at the exact moment you were there in the outer lane, right in the way.

It did not see you, it did not react. It just drove straight into the side of your trailer because it wanted to get into the outer lane. And if you did not see it because it was coming from behind at high speed, you had no chance to defend yourself. They hit you flat out, period, end of story.

They did not cause much damage, but it would definitely be 1 or 2 percent. There was no avoiding it, because you could not get out of their way. In some cases you could not see anything at all in those roundabouts. He would not know how to solve it any better, he had to be honest.

So you just accepted it. It is what it is. Sometimes a car hit you and it just could not be prevented. Sometimes you entered a roundabout, did not see a single car anywhere, and then something crashed and you had no idea why.

But as long as it stayed within a range where you were still earning more than the damage you picked up on the side, it was not tragic. He had learned the hard way what real blind spots could do. A colleague of his drove past a truck once. The truck signaled right, pulled over, and did not see her because she was in the blind spot.

She stayed in her lane and ended up with major damage to her car. What could you say? You could be driving a truck in real life and some idiot hits you from the side, and you cannot prevent it because some people do not even see a truck. He missed his turn, the one he actually wanted for the night.

It was still coming up, still two hours and 18 minutes away. Oh dear. So he kept going, past the famous construction site on the other side, and eventually he found himself talking about Texas itself, because you could not drive through this state without tripping over the subject. Texas was the state that said abortions were generally forbidden, without exception, apart from a few small exceptions.

If it was certain that both mother and child would be killed during birth, then under certain circumstances you might still get one. But a 12-year-old girl raped by her own father was obviously no reason for an abortion. Mhm. Yeah, that works well too.

It does work, after all. Self-protection works wonderfully. Especially deterrence through self-protection works really wonderfully. Nobody can say anything.

I mean, if I am not running around here with a gun on my hip to blast car thieves, what do I have it for? What do I have it for? I am not going to buy a gun and walk around with it if I can not use it here, for self-defense. That was the joke of the story, but fine, maybe one would not understand the Americans in that regard.

As long as the gun industry had so much power, so much influence, and paid so much money to politicians, it was like that. He turned the conversation toward tomorrow, the thing he was really looking forward to and also quite nervous about. He was going to the IAA, the big transport trade fair, and not just any day, but the press day. That was going to be a really cool thing, because it definitely would not be as crowded, and as a pure press representative you would be treated quite differently.

Martin understood. Those big role-playing games, he said, it is like, one more quest here, another quest there, we need more loot, and we have to bash a bit more. It can definitely become exhausting. The driver agreed, he was doing his best.

The thing was, when he went there, many of them already knew him. He was curious to finally meet Abdul Shabar from Trailer Dynamics in person and talk to him. Shabar had been enthusiastic about the idea of doing a livestream from inside his truck, so he might get back to him on that. They would talk it over in peace.

At Renault, a lot of people knew him. At Volvo, a lot of people knew him. It would be interesting to see the press spokesperson from Renault live for the first time, and from Volvo too. He had seen Larabel live for the first time at Gamescom, and that was totally funny, because he did not even recognize him at first.

When you only know them from the stream and suddenly they are standing in front of you live, that is a whole different story, but it was a really cool experience. At Scania he had spoken a few times with the nice lady from their social media department, and she was looking forward to meeting him too. Those were the moments where you could say, wow, I am really excited to meet these people again. Two years ago, when he was there, he had talked with Mr.

Rüdinger. The good Mr. Rüdinger. He had no idea that the man from the Rüdinger freight forwarding company would turn out to be one of the biggest entrepreneurs in electric driving.

He knew Rüdinger had a company, but that he now had 30 Renault T Electrics and a very large charging station that he had made public so other people could charge their electric trucks there, that was something else. Maybe Nano Jansen would confirm too, someone he had written to a few times. Really, really cool and nice stories, and he was already excited to see what was coming his way. He had decided he was actually going to stay there.

Maybe not until the very end, but at least until 9 PM, or in the worst case until 11 PM. As a press representative, he would be able to participate in the awards, Truck of the Year, Van of the Year, Trailer of the Year, Innovation of the Year, and then there was a big dinner afterwards. He had not known that either. They made a big deal of it yesterday, and then he was invited.

That would be a really cool thing, a chance to make connections and get into conversations. And hopefully they would learn some new things for the streams, because a lot would happen over the next few years anyway. Maybe they would run into the guys from SCS Software again, though with how big the trade fair was, you knew how likely it was to run into someone by chance, which was difficult. Thermo King had already given him a few likes for what he wrote about their electrified trailers.

There were many who simply knew his posts from Instagram or LinkedIn, and knew okay, there is someone doing something, someone taking action. He was really curious. But he thought the whole thing was going to be quite exhausting too. If things went really badly, he would be on the road from 1:30 tomorrow morning, and then on Tuesday, well, they would see.

His thoughts drifted to Tore, who had apparently promised his own cooking stream. When was your cooking stream again, Tore? He had done his own, and Martin could certainly testify that it was very successful. He was curious to see what Tore could pull off.

But that was not his fault, that was not their fault that the laptop gave out. That had nothing to do with the cooking. I never said it did, Tore, there are things a streamer does not need to say. I never claimed that either.

Oh god, and it was not even that hot. It was not even that hot. Then there was the subject of South Dakota, because if things went well, they would look at Saturday next week, maybe Thursday, if not the next weekend, and he wanted to give the viewers a bit of an impression of the state. South Dakota was divided into two parts.

The eastern part fit quite comfortably and relaxed with what they knew best, flat, slightly hilly area, straight roads, not much landscape, not a whole lot going on, but good land for agriculture with everything that entailed. The western part was divided into the Badlands and the Black Hills, a forested, mountainous, or at least hilly forest area. Unlike Texas, which was really just flat with straight roads, the Black Hills and above all the Badlands offered plenty of opportunities for off-roading. South Dakota was not a very densely populated area, under 1 million inhabitants, which was at least 100,000 more than in North Dakota.

Otherwise you would be in the middle of nowhere, if they even lived close enough to see each other, which was not really the case given the population density. The capital of South Dakota was Pierre. Pierre was a world metropolis with 14,000 inhabitants. They just chose the place that was fairly central as the capital, and that was Pierre, 14,000 inhabitants for the capital of the state.

Quite impressive. South Dakota liked to call itself the center of the USA, purely geo-geometrically the actual center of the country. It is what it is. Otherwise South Dakota was quite famous for one thing, Sturgis.

Sturgis was located there, and in Sturgis was one of the world’s largest motorcycle rallies. The rally took place once a year, logically, and over the course of a week it drew a few hundred thousand visitors. The band lineup was quite impressive, Metallica, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, Megadeth. Some really big bands played in Sturgis, and accordingly, it was not all that uninteresting.

He was from San Antonio, he was coming here anyway, so. Sturgis itself was not a large town, like Wacken was for them, a place that was suitable because of its infrastructure, the necessary roads, electricity, gas, and water, but small enough that it had no problems hosting such a festival, because the festival was practically everything to this town. You could at most go there and include it as a delivery point, the festival itself as a delivery point. You could do it, but you did not have to.

But Sturgis was certainly one of the most important cultural events of the year for South Dakota and a major draw. Otherwise South Dakota was a big tourist center, especially with Mount Rushmore and everything that went with it, the hiking trails, the Badlands, the Black Hills, truly famous nature reserves. And Mount Rushmore had a story to it, the secret of why the mountain was called that. Before they even started with agriculture there, South Dakota was mainly known for its mines, and the silver men who arrived there were a really important point.

The mountain where the faces of the presidents were embedded was called Mount Rushmore simply because a New York lawyer was visiting back in the early days of settlement. He was traveling through South Dakota with his guide and asked at this mountain, what is the name of this mountain? And the guide said, well, it does not have a name, but one could certainly call it Mount Rushmore, since that was the lawyer’s name. And so the mountain was actually named after Mr.

Rushmore. Right. He found his spot. He could comfortably and relaxed drive in here, park the truck, and stay overnight until tomorrow.

Engine off. Stay overnight. Ten hours, he would be there until 8:36 AM. Well, you could not stay for less than that.

So that worked. He had made it to 65 miles to go, almost there. He said good morning to Wolfgang, who had just joined, and turned his attention to food, because it was time to look at what they had to offer this morning. They had kolaches and klobasneks, brought by the Czech immigrants who arrived in the 19th century, who introduced these pastries to Texas.

Basically they were yeast pastries filled with fruit or cheese, or with small sausages, and they were both popular Texan breakfast and snack items. They were right here at the truck stop. That would be a quite delicious thing for breakfast. He could easily imagine enjoying them while driving, three or four pieces on the tray, a coffee with it, and you could definitely enjoy all that stuff while driving.

Why not? Then there was the Texas Red Chili. Logically, if they were in Texas now, chili was natural. It came from Mexico in all sorts of variations.

What was important here was a really good, spicy chili, whether with ground meat or with chunks of meat, which could definitely be hot, which could also be really hot here. And as a third item, Texas caviar, very famous, with tomatoes, beans, corn, avocado, peppers, onions, all dressed with a vinaigrette, and as a side dish it actually always belonged with a barbecue. Yes, indeed. So much for the delicacies from Texas.

They jumped back in and headed toward San Angelo. He had forgotten, he could have waited. He would see if they could find a rest stop just before, so they could pull out quickly, recharge a bit, and that was it. A wonderful good morning to you all and a very relaxed Sunday, he said, and the road stretched on ahead of him through the flat Texas morning, with the state map still sitting there at 97.

66 percent, and 0. 2 percent still waiting somewhere out there to be found.