My friend also happens to be a director for the nonprofit organization TECHO. Most Americans haven't heard of it, but it's basically Habitat for Humanity, except replace the virtue signaling with getting actual shit done: instead of building one "first world problems"-style hermetically sealed giant two story house per summer, TECHO stands up entire mini-villages of prefab structures, complete with water filtration systems!
In any event, I also hacked in a waypoint at his first ever event he volunteered for many years ago, up in the mountains. Sneak preview: it's quite the sight from up there. But without further ado, here is me flying past downtown Murderapolis, just after having taken off:
Minnesota is pretty boring: flat; lakes; farms; and that's it.
I landed at Kansas City's big airport to refuel. The game generated some kind of freeway, with bridges clipping right through the airport, and cars traveling and clipping right through my plane as I taxied to the gate!
I proceeded to fly South, over Texas and part of Louisiana, nothing too interesting: pretty flat and boring. But then, I hit the Eastern side near Corpus Christi, and flew for what felt like forever over these absolutely other-wordly sand bar island thingies. How the heck did these even form?
I landed at one airport to re-fuel. But shortly after, I saw a tiny airstrip right on one of the weird sand bar things: "I absolutely have to try landing my giant Cessna there." And I managed to pull it off!
It wasn't long after that I started to approach the mountains North of Puebla. Here is a sneak peak at my custom hacked waypoints. I took a look at them, took a deep breath, and climbed up and over the first mountain ridge:
Whereupon I saw... this. It was like teleporting into a whole new world. It was one of those few times where a video game literally took my breath away:
After catching my breath and re-orienting myself, I found my friend's first-ever work site-- or whatever the heck the game constructed out of it, anyway!
This was like eleven thousand feet up in the mountains. Notice the huge mountain in the background-- I flew around that to get to this point:
My last stop: my friend's house! I couldn't figure out exactly which one was his, but this should be the intersection he lives on at least:
Here is Puebla then afterwards, as I banked away, circled around, and flew past it on the way to its airport.
With a grandiose name like "Hermanos Serdán International Airport", I was expecting a big ordeal, like the many I'd flown over in the States on the way in. Instead, it was a single runway with one terminal building! Oh bien. So I landed, parked, and that was that-- fun trip!
I don't actually know how long the entire trip took-- maybe six and a half hours? This was cruising at 10k feet, at 270 kts most of the time.
The game randomly crashed (har har) part-way through, so my stop watch got reset, hence why I'm not totally certain-- I had to generate a new mission from a mid-point to "resume" the journey: kind of a hassle.
I also had to restart a second time, after the drone camera dropped my airspeed to literally zero, and my aircraft plunged nose-first into a house in Puebla: another bug in the game; use the drone camera at your severe risk.
But in spite of not being quite ready for prime time, Flight Simulator is still quite playable even in this early-doors state.