A busman’s holiday is a vacation when you do something similar to your usual work, following the late 19th-century example of a bus driver at leisure who takes a bus trip.
Last weekend I spent some time with my 11-year old nephew. He loves computer games, and one of his favorites involve dirivng heavy trucks — usually just the cab or “bobtail” — through various simulations. He has also used a free online simulator, based on Google Maps, to suggest shortcuts and other new routes that help his parents to save time.
That started me thinking about our DAT customers who drive for a living. Many of them truly love trucks, as do their colleagues in offices and warehouses. Maybe they don’t actually think of driving as a vacation activity, but they might enjoy the simulations. Or, like my nephew, they might also want to explore new routes before they actually leave their home base. Of course, being an 11-year old boy, my nephew gleefully drives his simulated truck onto the sidewalk, crashes it into buildings and police cars, and generally causes a lot of simulated mayhem. Hey — he’s 11. By the time he is elegible for his CDL, he will have gotten it all out of his system.
The link is at www.geoquake.com. Choose the 3D simulator, and enter a street address as your starting point, then drive either a car or a bus down actual streets created from satellite images. They look remarkably similar to the real world. For example, here is the simulation of our parking lot at TransCore DAT, which is a (silghtly) cartoonish version of view from my office window:
The parking lot at TransCore DAT, as depicted in Geoquake’s 3D driving simulator.
