ROUTE
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The two-day 8781trn route took the form of a loop, starting and finishing at the southern edge of Munich.
The test began in a motorway service area on the A9 motorway just north of the city, and as the trucks prepared for the start early on the first morning, it was clear that the fine Alpine weather of the previous day's hill climbs had deserted us: the air was cold and damp, with a dense fog spoiling the view, as it would for much of the two-day run. The first section of the route took the trucks north against busy commuter traffic on the A9 and the gently undulating A93, which we followed for some 70km past Regensburg, before picking up some rural secondaries to our lunch stop at Amberg.
Having fuelled and swapped trailers our shiny convoy moved on, leaving the crowded truckstop to the battle-scarred Turkish and Eastern-European rigs.
Returning to the motorway, we headed west to the north of Nuremberg on the A3 before leaving the main road again just beyond Wiirzburg; this stretch of motorway, and the country roads that took us to our overnight stop, provided the drivers with some challenging climbs.
The second day dawned as foggy as the first as we picked up a fresh load of dery and a different trailer ready to clock up some more miles.
Most of the morning was taken up with steady motorway running back to Witrzburg on the A3, then south to Heilbronn on the A81 and west on the A6. The sun even managed an appearance, which helped us follow some tight, winding roads leading to lunch at the neat BP truckstop in Feuchtwangen.
In many ways the final afternoon provided the hardest going of the run as we took the A7 motorway down to Ulm, and the A8 towards Munich through a mixture of heavy traffic and poor visibility, single-carriageway roads to complete our journey.
As the daylight faded, the fog thickened, and the roads got tighter, it needed all the drivers' skill to maintain decent progress through the twists and turns of the route; it was with some relief that we finished our trip on the outskirts of Munich.