Second Solo Stint

I finished my first solo stint last week, spent some time at home, and I've been back on the road for three days now. To start things off, I had a quick load from the terminal to a location just a few miles away, then I got a load to Spokane, Washington by way of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I'm excited to add some more Western states to my list. I've driven through 23 already and I'll hit 24 tomorrow when I cross into Washington. I delivered half my current load in Coeur d'Alene today and will finish off the trip tomorrow morning in Spokane. Though being less than an hour away, I can't deliver the rest of the load to the final stop because there are scheduled delivery times. While appointments can be stressful to make, they can also provide down time to do things like jog, shower for the first time in a few days, do laundry (which I may well have forgotten in the machine if I hadn't written this), and catch up on life stuff. I get more money when I lay down more miles, but a string of 10+ hour days gets pretty tiring.

The area of the Idaho panhandle I'm in made for a really pretty jog today. I've not run since I hit the road on Monday, so I pounded out a solid hour today under a sun that I swear didn't move all afternoon. I don't know if that's from the nine extra degrees of latitude or if I just wasn't paying attention. The Montana mountains along I-90 were also very pretty, and reminded me of the Colorado mountains with the terrain and types of trees. I didn't hit snow, but there was some left over higher on the mountains. The precipitation I really want is a good rain. My truck is dusty, covered in bug splat, and the days are starting to get warm. Nothing like a cleansing, cooling rain to make everything better.

I'm including some pictures from the last several weeks; I wish I could snap more pictures along the road to better represent my experiences, but there are obvious technical issues with that. This first one shows some goofy, bug-antenna-looking street lights over the interstate in southeastern Michigan.

I thought I'd forgo the gory ripped flesh photo and just show the post-op. Imagine a 3/8 inch wide metal band made of thick aluminum can material, used to seal a trailer to verify the load hasn't been tampered with. Now imagine not being able to tear the band off by tugging on it a few times with a solid metal tool. Stick with me, here's the punch line: further imagine being dumb enough to put your own (non-metallic) human flesh through the band and tugging until the loop breaks, sliding its sharp edges past and into said flesh. Thankfully, I had the foresight to have antibiotic ointment and bandages on the truck.

Pet-conscious rest area.

This last one shows the docking area of the Albuquerque Convention Center. If you're wondering, yes, it is a very poor design for full-sized semi trucks. I tried getting out around the truck on the right, but since grinding off my front end on the cement wall and ripping the other guy's front end off with my trailer didn't sound like my idea of a fun night, I had to wait almost an hour for him to get loaded and leave before I could fit out.

 

 

I just realized that, though a polo shirt makes me a bit more professional-looking than a lot of truckers, it also causes people to think I'm an employee at the businesses I patronize. I'm typing this in a Subway at a truck stop. A man just asked something about a restaurant and I, thinking he was wondering how to get a hold of the employees who were obscured in the back, told him to ring the bell. He clarified and asked if the restaurant was gone, not in the casual tone of one traveler talking to another, but more pointedly as if it were in my purview to know. Having never been here, I somewhat bemusedly answered that I thought the Subway was all that the truck stop had. I realized after he left that my dark polo resembles those of both the truck stop and Subway employees. This has happened before; apparently the lack of a name tag doesn't count for much.

 

Scott

Life on the Road

I finished my on-the-road training with Swift, the company for which I drive, the weekend before last. I got my own truck on Wednesday and hit the road, taking a load of empty beer cans to Ohio, where they would get filled. That first day was stressful, what with running around the Swift terminal like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to find an empty trailer. The way this can place works, we have to leave an acceptable empty trailer before hauling away the can-laden trailer. "Acceptable" is specifically defined, and hopping up in each trailer to check it for acceptability on a sunny day gets tiring, especially when you only have 15 minutes in which to find a trailer, get it inspected, and drive half an hour to pick up the load on time. I'm learning that I need to allow a lot more time for unexpected delays. Like, a lot.

I'm currently outside the Chicago Metro area, with my last message having informed me that there are very few loads in this area, so I should find a place to hang out. Thankfully, I am already parked at a Walmart near a few eateries. If I had to drive anywhere, my onboard GPS/computer would start counting down my daily 14-hour clock. Truckers have 14 hours from the start of our on-duty time in which to complete up to 11 hours of driving before having to take a rest period. "Fourteen hours is an eternity," you say? Well, it can feel like that at times, but when you consider that if my 14-hour clock started ticking at 9:00am and I got a load at, say, 8:00 this evening, I would be left with less than half of my daily driving time available, likely necessitating me to take an additional rest period on that run. Since the rest period must be at least ten hours, what could have been a leisurely trip with all the pit stops I could ask for easily turns into a harried butt-hauling session.

Speaking of butt-hauling, my second run was going to be leisurely. After taking forever dealing with the trailer's broken landing gear (retractable struts at the front), deciding to try adhering to my company's silly US highway route instead of my onboard GPS's faster interstate route, and getting a flat tire, I was really sweating it trying to get the load in on time. I kept having visions of having to sleep on the side of the road, getting a demerit for late delivery, not making it to Walmart to get groceries to put in my cooler (the horror). I like having the down time now, but I've never been good utilizing down time when I don't know how long it's going to be. So, I'm at a Dunkin' Donuts trying to find normal jobs back home and getting back in the swing of blogging.

A quick note regarding the tire blowout, the only clue I initially had was a weird noise. Apparently, 100+ PSI rupturing 3/8" of rubber makes quite the loud noise if I could hear it 60 feet away over the radio and engine. I thought it may have been cargo falling over, but I was on a glass-smooth road at the time (unpaid plug for the Indiana interstate system). A couple miles down the road, I noticed in the mirror one of my tires looked a little rough. If it hadn't been the obvious outside side wall of the outside tire, I may never have known I had a flat or what the noise was.


Below are some pictures of things I've seen along the way.

Scott

 You've heard of row houses. There are also row clouds above US 287 in Southern Colorado.

 

 

 Brilliant hands-free bathroom door handle in Toot 'n Totum north of Amarillo, TX. I guess you'd call it a footle.

 Parked back on the grass, you can see Mater. Tow Mater. Roughly near Alvord, TX.

That dark cloisonne truck, as Volvo calls it, is mine. I'm dropping off an empty trailer and picking up a load of empty cans in Golden, CO.

 

 Blown out tire, just East of the IL-IN state line on I-74.

March Newsletter

March consisted of driving training with my company, Swift. Yesterday, I finally finished my training and got to go home for the night. I'm very excited about this, since I get a couple more nights at home, and when I start driving again, I won't be sharing a tiny living space. I'm currently at the terminal, waiting to hear the results of a road test and take a written test that assure my company that I'm ready to be on my own.

Over the last month, I've had LOTS of time to think about how to utilize my driving time. I plan to continue using the Pimsleur Spanish learning CDs to get a useful language under my belt before moving on to learning others. I also plan to utilize iTunes U's free audio lectures to learn about history, recap anatomy, and learn about the cultures whose languages I want to learn. I'm thinking translation work would be fun to get into. For now, it's really good to have an income again.

I'm hoping to be able to take my home time throughout the country to visit family and friends in the coming months.

Scott

Just ok in OK

I've been pursuing a truck driving job since February. While in truck driving school, I was prehired at Swift Transportation, and officially signed on with them after graduating. Company orientation was three days, and I then started Swift's driver training with a mentor driver. This training period lasts 240 driving hours, and I currently have around 140 after three and a half weeks. It took a few days for me to build up my driving endurance before I really started racking up hours, and several days were spent not driving. Not driving is actually what I'm doing again now. My mentor has to sort out some driver's license technicalities, then get his wife to doctor appointments, and since he's from Oklahoma, that's where we've been for a couple days. We've stayed at his parents' house the last two nights while he sorts out the license, then he's going to put me up in a hotel for another two nights when we go up to where he and his life live. It's nice having a break from the road, but it would be nicer to be done with training and take my breaks at my own home instead of someone else's. One of the frustrations with training for anything is not being able to use my own methods, being on someone else's schedule, and in general not having control. This was one of  the issues I had with medical training, too. Thankfully, I'll be done with driving training by mid April. I'm kind of bitter that I'm sitting around instead of racking up hours and completing training, and that I'll likely be stuck on the road in a stupid truck with someone I barely know on my birthday this year. I'm pretty sure I could ask to have a day or two back home to celebrate, but that would just prolong training that much more. While we're holed up in Oklahoma, I'm trying not to focus exclusively on the negative aspect of prolonging my training, and instead look also at the life experience I'm gaining by getting to know new people in a new place.

Speaking of medical training, I've been toying with the idea of getting back into it. I don't like having this unfinished thing hanging over my head. I also don't like the idea of not living up to my potential. At the same time, I need only think about the details of medical training and I can feel my anxiety rising, increasing my pulse and breathing rate. I want to get counselling in any case, but if I do get back into medicine, it will be a necessity. The anxiety caused by medicine, combined with the fact that I can utilize my intelligence and desire to help people in non-medical careers, make me think I should keep searching for another career. I never planned to stay in trucking more than a few years, since there aren't opportunities for the type of advancement I would want, and it doesn't help people as directly as I want to do. It's irritating that most careers I could get into would take me out of the hands-on realm and back into training for a while, which makes me hesitant to pursue anything else too soon. Actually having an income is nice, too, but at the same time I could do a lot better for myself than a trucker's income.

So as not to give too negative an impression of how I'm doing, I do feel better off now that I was six months ago. I'm hopeful about the future, and even the aspects of the future causing trepidation are not preventing me from wanting a future, but rather causing me to plan more thoroughly. Aside from figuring out my next career, my big focus now is paying off my debt. It should only be a couple more weeks before my smallest loan is paid in full, which will feel like a big accomplishment. When I finish training and my income stabilizes, I'm going to more fully implement Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, and I'm very excited about getting on top of my finances.

Lots to sort through, but it's good to know I'm not stagnating in life. Have a good one.

Scott

February Newsletter

I'm posting my newsletter early this month because I may be busy for the next seven weeks. Backing up a bit, I've been in truck driving training for the past three weeks and just finished, earning my Commercial Driver's License, on Friday. I have been in touch with Swift, a trucking carrier company, and have a pre-hire, meaning that I should get officially hired as long as my background check clears and I can show them that I didn't earn my CDL with my good looks. I start orientation with them tomorrow, and my recruiter just got me the orientation info early this morning. Per that info, I need to check into the hotel in which they're housing us at three this afternoon. Orientation is three days long, and I need to be ready to hit the road with my mentor driver for a six-week stretch starting at the conclusion of orientation. While it is tough packing on shorter notice than I had planned, I think the real hard part has been copying and organizing all the paperwork.

I'm excited that an employment opportunity is finally coming along. It was so frustrating applying to so many places and hearing nothing back. I'm also excited about all the travel I'll be doing, but I also have some trepidation about whether germophobia and homesickness will kick into high gear if I'm away from home for so long and exclusively using public bathroom and laundry facilities while adhering to my mentor driver's time frame. I plan to rely heavily on shower shoes, hand sanitizer, and staying in contact with family and friends.

Keep on truckin'.

Scott

January Newsletter

Getting this one in just under the wire. January has seen a redoubled effort to get a job, along with increased frustration at not getting one. I would like a teaching position, but everywhere I have looked doesn't seem to be interested in hiring for this semester. I have been tutoring math and science to a few middle school and high school students. It's been a challenge relearning everything well enough to teach it, but it has been really fun and rewarding at the same time. I only get a few hours of work each week, if that, and since the formal teaching positions have not come through, a couple days ago I finally locked in the decision to pursue a career I've always found intriguing. I signed up for truck driving school and just today I got my driver's permit and earned many of the CDL endorsements. I'm excited about the truck driving opportunity because it's a pretty sure thing that I can get a job; it's solitary, fitting well with my introverted nature; and it involves a lot of travel. Plus, it involves new, different experiences, and I value that in life.

My girlfriend is leaving for a trip with her family tomorrow. She lives out of town anyway, but it's odd knowing she'll be out of state. We're able to work around the distance, which is good.

Life keeps rolling otherwise.

Scott