At the beginning of the moth, the Greece DLC released for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Along with it comes the “Cruising Greece” event which challenges players to collectively drive 200,000,000km while delivering cargo to any city in the country. There’s also a personal goal to deliver goods to or from all 15 cities on the map. For the jobs to count, they must be distance of 200km or more. and it has to be from the external market which requires your own truck.

This event just so happened to coincide with me starting a new profile in ETS2. I had a bunch of profiles built up over the years of sporadically playing together with the Squad. They all mostly have huge bank loans or unlimited money and I wanted to play the game right and start fresh this time around. I know very little about the game other than drive the truck to the destination which, come to find out, is like 90% of the game anyways.

Since I wanted to participate in the event, I had to choose a starting city in Greece. I went with Kalamata, not because its the name of a delicious olive (well maybe a little..) but because it was the southernmost starting city. My thought being that starting further south would mean more cities would be 200km or more from me.

The next thing I needed was my own truck. Trucks are expensive and I didn’t want to spend time using other people’s trucks via Quick Jobs. So I did what any sensabile person would do, I took out a €100,000 loan from the bank to finance a used truck! Even 100k doesn’t get you much truck but I took what I could get, a Volvo FH3 Sleeper with 420hp and 9,000km already on it. It gets the jobs done, though sometimes when I take a heavy cargo mission I get a message that my truck isn’t optimized for it. I haven’t run into anything I couldn’t haul yet.

The tricky parts of completing the event are the six cities located on the islands of Greece. Argostoli, Chania, Chios, Heraklion, Mitilini, and Rhodes can only be accessed by taking a ferry from one of the ports. However, The minimum 200km distance only counts for land travel. It took traveling to two or three cities before I figured out why they weren’t being counted. I was traveling 300km+ but only 30km or so of that distance was over land. The rest was spent lounging on a ferry.

The island cities are fun but challenging to drive a truck through. There are some very narrow streets and some very tight corners that I was not ready for. I learned pretty quickly how close I could get to objects on either side of the truck and how to not get the trailer stuck on turns.

The Greece map has some stunning views for a game that’s 12 years old. I find myself constantly going to photo mode to look around and take pictures. I have more pictures of a “truck in front of things” in my screenshot folder than I ever thought I would.

I currently have 3 cities left to visit to complete the event: Athens, Mitilini, and Patras. All three cities, are fairly close to each other so I’ll most likely be taking a job from each city to somewhere else that meets the minimum distance requirements and then driving to the next city before taking another job. I’m kind of surprised it’s taken me this long to deliver or take a job from Athens. I’ve through Athens plenty of times and I’ve been in and out of the port there actually stopped in the city itself.

My plan is to finish the Greece event this week so I can start working on the winter event that started earlier this week. I really need some Christmas lights for my truck!