Any old promotor drivers around

Hello Sandway, I am hoping that you and The Promotors guys can help me out here as I know that you lads went to many places in Yugoslavia which were way off the T.I.R. transit route.
On the Astran / Middle East thread a new Trucknet member was asking where in Bulgaria there was a Douglas Dakota D.C. 3 parked up next to a restaurant.
I remembered that it was in one of the first lay-bys after you went through the border coming out of Yugoslavia near Dimitrograd and going into Bulgaria at Gradinje.
I knew that I had seen a photo of it somewhere on Trucknet and after a lot of searching I came across this photo that was posted by a guy called Simon who drove for David Duxberry back in the eighties.

Dakota%20Yugo.jpeg.jpg

I shall add the Duxberry thread link as there are some cracking photos on it which a few lads might find interesting.

viewtopic.php?f=35&t=80507&p=2141420&hilit=dakota#p2141420

Now getting back to the Dakota, on Simon’s photo it is marked Dakota Yugo so now it’s got me wondering if ever there was another Dakota restaurant where the Brit drivers used to park up. If there was another one somewhere in Yugo then I have a feeling that the Promotors guys would of stopped there or heard about it.
That photo also brought back another long lost memory for me because on one of my first trips somewhere on the continent, I can’t remember where it was but I was probably sat with a load of old drivers and a table full of empty beer bottles when they were discussing how that Dakota ended up there.
Now being a young fellow in my late twenties and being new to the job I always listened to the older experienced hands so when one of them explained to everybody that the plane had been doing a supply drop to The Chetniks or Tito’s partisans fighting the Germans in world war two then I am afraid to say that I believed him. It seemed plausible at the time that an aircraft could get stuck in the mud and be abandoned in a war zone.
So for nearly forty years I believed this story and didn’t think much about it, until that photo cropped up again a couple of days ago.
Now with the help of my friend Google I have to admit that I think that the guy whoever it was that night was doing a bit of leg pulling.
Something that I never thought about and like I said I never thought much about it was why was that Dakota painted silver and not camouflage or green. Also, where the Dakota is parked it’s in the middle of a mountainous region unless the pilot managed to land it on the road.
Why is it Bulgaria when Tito was operating up in Yugoslavia and I didn’t know until yesterday that hundreds of Dakotas were actually built in Russia.
Those old drivers eh, they certainly could spin a good yarn and I bet that everybody met one on their travels.
What I also found out which I thought was quite interesting was that two Bulgarian Mig fighters actually shot down an El -Al Super Constellation which was on a flight from London to Istanbul and had strayed out of Yugoslav air space.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_402

As the Promotors lads stayed at the Zagreb Motel quite often can you remember the mid air collision involving a British Airways Trident over Zagreb in 1976. I think that it was a World In Action or a Panorama programme which dramatized the events in 1979 so for some reason I used to wonder whereabouts the two planes actually crashed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Zagr … _collision

It’s only today that I have found out that they actually crashed in Vrbovac about 20 miles from Zagreb and about 40 miles from Novo Mesto where we regularly used to deliver refrigerators to the Adria Caravan factory.
We had to clear customs in Zagreb at one time and then run up to the factory to off load but in later years they used to call a customs man out to come round to the factory to sort the paperwork out.
So if anybody can remember if there was another Dakota next to a restaurant in Yugoslavia then I would be really pleased to hear about it.

Regards Steve.