Profile For Burntstick

My wife and I are starting our CDL training tomorrow and I was wondering if some of you who have been through it recently could share what you thought was the most difficult parts of it. What gave you the most troubles?

Thank you, we'd love to hear about your experience! I appreciate your willingness to talk. Safe travels, hope to meet you soon!

It will all come together. Its very good you are prepared. Don't sweat the permit test for Montana... You will hit the ground running in Missoula. Its great fun and the support systems are in place! I will be there on Monday, or tonight if I feel like pushin' it a bit.....Will make sure to introduce myself and we can have a chat about my very recent experience with the program.

Hello, if you're interested in reading my first two posts to catch up on some of our backstory I started them on the diary titled 'On a Greyhound to Montana and our trucking future with Jim Palmer'. I'm going to be posting under this heading from here on. It just rolls off the tongue easier!

This part of the world is waking up. It's going on 6 am and our bus is an hour and a half east of Missoula, Montana. An hour and half from our final destination on this 40 hour bus ride.The sun is slowly emerging casting a hazy light over the landscape. It's beautiful. A far cry from the corn and soybean fields of central Illinois. HilIs shrouded in smoke from nearby wildfires and valleys being grazed on by herds of cattle. I can imagine the cattle smells on par to the folks on this bus today. Myself included. One can't spend 40 hours on a bus living out of fast food and gas station bathrooms and come out smelling like roses. I can't wait to get off this bus. If everything goes right it will be a long time, if ever, that we find ourselves on one of these coach buses. It hasn't been totally unpleasant, but close. It surprises me that comfort is not taken into account at all when these coaches were being designed. Or perhaps the engineers designing them thought they did have comfort in mind and just missed by a country mile. Regardless, an hour and a half from now it'll be someone else's discomfort. We'll be heading toward a hotel room reserved for us by Jim Palmer Trucking and straight to, what I hope, is a nice long nap on a real bed. We'll get picked up by a shuttle from the Days Inn. I desperately hope there's somewhere near the hotel to get some real food too. Greyhound buses don't stop at truck stops, but at fast food restaurants or just ordinary gas stations, well, at least the ones we've been on since we left. In Chicago we luckily had enough time to find a restaurant, but I had a hamburger, not knowing that for the next 35 hours that's all that would be available. You live and you learn. I can't eat another fast food burger or gas station hot dog though. I need some real sustenance. For our family everything about this is new. Our children both have new lives too. One of the twins moved to be with his older brother in New Mexico for independence from his father(I’m a step-father) and his family, while the other twin stayed back in Illinois having just started a great job at a big hospital. He seems content in his decision to stay and Valerie and I are happy he's found a rewarding job that keeps him motivated. They're both extremely supportive of our decision and have been a part of this from the very beginning. We've leaned on them when doubt loomed and they held us up each time. We're here in large part part because of their love and support. That's how our family works. A friend on a large farm, with a mouse problem happily took our cats, whom she hopes gets right to work eradicating the rodents. If I know those two felines they're already on the job. Disemboweling small critters seemed to be a favorite pastime of theirs at our house. Birds, rabbits, chipmunks, and of course mice were regularly displayed inside out on our back porch. They're cats, it's what they do. Where we get hung up a little is with our dog, Cholo. He's become the heart of our family since we rescued(who rescued who?) him a little over two years ago. He was just a puppy then, only about 4 months old but came from a bad situation and was terrified of everything. He's come a long way. A Chihuahua mix of some odd sort, he has woven himself into our life in ways I never thought possible. Valerie and I have always had large dogs so we were both a little apprehensive when we met Cholo, but it didn't take long. When I get on wifi and figure out how to upload photos I promise to show him off. We knew he couldn't come to training with us so we had to find a suitable place for him to stay until such time that we could all be reunited in our truck. I'd be lying if I said it's not a big motivator for us to learn our new craft so we can get our little boy back. He's staying with a good friend, a doctor and his wife and two girls for the time. They have three dogs of their own and have watched Cholo for us several times in the past so there's a history there. When we dropped him off on Friday he was off running and playing with the other dogs, barely noticing that we were leaving without him. We've already received many Snapchats from him and he's doing just fine. Just fine indeed. Jim Palmer has a great pet policy and that was a huge reason we tried so hard to get on with them. It surprised me to learn how few trucking companies allow pets. It was an immediate deal breaker for us. JPT allows for a wide range of pets from what I can tell, as long as there's only one. A large part of our dream to become truckers included having our little Cholo with us. He'll be the perfect trucker dog. Our mascot. Although this is a big change for us, I'm sure it is for every family when a parent decides to take on the life as an over-the-road truck driver. If it were just me going out to do this I don't think it would work for us. The major appeal for us is getting to be together, husband and wife(and dog of course). Half an hour from Missoula...it's starting to set in. We're really doing this. Our entire family is really doing this. Thank you again for stopping by. I'll be back soon. Shiny side up my friends, shiny side up :)

Twenty-one miles outside of Sturgis, South Dakota. The bus trip is long, but Missoula is constantly getting closer. When I sit and try to imagine what the next week, the next month, year have in store for Valerie and I my head starts to swim a bit. Even though I’ve been studying and feel confident about the permit tests and I know I'll be ready for the CDL tests, I still haven't taken them yet. What if I fail? What if no matter how good the trainers are and the instruction is I just can't master double clutching, backing, incline starts? What if...what if… what if. I'm not one to let self-doubt settle in and I'm not about to let it now. Not now. Not after everything it took us to get to this point. No way, no how. We got this. One of the first and probably the biggest undertaking we tackled was downsizing our lives. We knew above all else that there was no way a move out west could include all of our current belongings. So much of it wasn't even ours, but our parents’,whom we had both lost several years back. So much was holdovers from lives past that just didn't fit in ours anymore and regardless of sentimental attachments we absolutely knew it had to be drastically whittled down. So the process began. Yard sales, auctions, eBay, donations...this went on for months. A basement chock full of someone else's life. Plate ware, knick knacks, bicycles, glassware. Glassware for days! An attic populated with furniture, clothes, books and dusty boxes upon moldy boxes of old pictures both in album form and loose. Hundreds of framed old photos of forgotten family and friends from forty years or more ago. It was agonizing to part with them, and my wife bore the heaviest burden because most were her mother's belongings. Valerie was an oak though and never wavered. Except for a few personally meaningful items she either found homes for or burned the rest. It was a daunting task and one that she took head on and won. There were tools from my father's garage including chainsaws, power washers, an air compressor, weed whip and more screwdrivers and hammers than I care to mention. Nails, rivets, bolts, floodlights.. the list could go on for ever it seemed. Somehow I got it all down to two medium sized tool boxes. We filled no less than 4 nine-yard dumpsters over a period of a year with junk. Junk we couldn't give away. Junk we couldn't burn. We still marvel at the sheer amount of it. It never seemed to end. And then it did. We had done it. We had downsized all of our belongings and currently it is all packed neatly in a 10x20 storage unit in Central Illinois. It could be a year or more before we lay eyes on it again. All this so we would be ready to hit the road when we got the call and had no reason to look back. Forward only. Straight out the cab of a semi-truck. We were determined to do this the right way for us. Tomorrow we arrive in Missoula and all of our planning and life changing efforts will start to pay off. I’ve just got to be able to recall leakage rates for single vehicle and combination vehicles. The right tire depth required on steer tires. What glad hands are for, what angle to attach them to each other at and a ton of other things. I’ve got this. We’ve got this. This is exactly what we've been working so hard for. Thank you if you actually made it this far. I know not everyone will, perhaps nobody, and that's ok. I realize this isn't a conventional diary here on TT, but I've been wanting to get all this out. I won't apologize for the length of it or the depth. I just wanted to share our story. It's not a story that's wildly incredible or strange. Just our story and if you decide to check back I'll be sharing more of it if the moderators allow. Please be careful out there and don't forget to keep the shiny side up and the dirty side down. ~~~ Leonardo

Roughly a year ago my wife, Valerie, and I chose to make some big changes in our life. Our children were going to be graduating high school the following spring and that was to be the date we'd use to start executing our plan. Neither one of us were satisfied in our current jobs, her being a high school teacher, and me currently working as a welder in a small local shop. We wanted out of Illinois, a state in seemingly increasing financial distress, as well as just not holding interest for us anymore. Valerie was born and had spent her entire life there and I was in my ninth year of living there. It was time to find a new home. A new career. After some research we started looking into the commercial truck driving industry. It became very clear to us that this was exactly the path forward for us! It offered us everything we were looking for. Adventure, travel, financial stability, and the opportunity for us to work together. We absolutely knew this was the right decision for us, and our future. As with any decision of this magnitude there were many challenges and a ton of planning that needed to be done. One does not simply uproot an entire life and get into a truck. We'll, maybe there are those that could, but we wanted to do this smartly and without leaving anything to chance. We knew we wanted to leave Illinois for good at the same time we started our new career. That in itself presents many challenges. Where to go? Who were we going to work for? What do we do with all of our belongings? What about the boys(we have twin boys, now 18 years old)? What about our pets(two cats and our little dog, Cholo, a Chihuahua mix)? With so much to consider we knew we had to start planning early and to not rush any major decisions. We'd been renting the same house for over six years, which helped, since we didn't need to go through the process of selling a home. Our landlord was more than willing to let us stay right up to our move, which was a huge relief. It didn't quite work out that way, but it was close. More on that another time. Immediately we started researching trucking companies. Not sure if any of you noticed, but there are a ton of them! Big ones, little ones, good ones, bad ones. We knew we wanted to move out West so that's where we focused our energy. We would have to learn how to drive a big rig of course so we started narrowing it down to companies that offered paid training. Now the list is getting smaller and more manageable. It now was a matter of investigating the handful of companies that met our needs. I can't even begin to explain just how much help Trucking Truth was in not only this aspect, but so many different parts of this process. Absolutely indispensable! We found so many articles from so many different viewpoints that helped us in many of our decisions. Not to mention the CDL test preparation! It has been vital to our development. I cannot overstate that! Currently, Valerie and I, are on a Greyhound bus heading to Missoula, Montana to start our training class with Jim Palmer Trucking on Monday. We couldn't be happier! We've been studying like crazy for our permit exam and watching videos and of course reading TT articles. This has been a long time coming and we're ready. Nervous, anxious, excited, but confident. I look forward to sharing our experiences with the TT community and to learn more about this new life we've chosen. Thank you for stopping by! I promise to update and to share more of our story as the time goes on. Much love and safe travels! ~~~ Leonardo