A Husband And Wife Trucking Journey

I'm very glad you're enjoying Cornelius!

Needless to say the adventure continues! We grabbed showers at the main terminal , did laundry, dropped off the truck we were delivering, swapped all of our personal stuff over to the trainers regular truck, and developed a deeper understanding as to why drivers hate going into terminals. We then immediately received a load assignment and took off. We are to pick up a trailer in Atlanta, Ga and then grab the load and head for Salt Lake City, Utah. As I'll be driving tonight I went to sleep. I awoke to the truck stopping over and over as my wife and trainer yelled out the window repeatedly attempting to get directions from people. I sat up to find myself in the middle of this MASSIVE rail yard here in Atlanta, Georgia attempting to find our trailer under an absolutely gorgeous sunset. The place is miles long and filled with thousands upon thousands of trailers. As nobody can find the damn thing we are still, at this very moment, driving through rows, upon rows, upon rows of trailers hunting for it as dispatch attempts to obtain more information as to it's actual location.

Thanks for posting Larry. This is helping alot of people. It's always interesting to read different takes and experiences from different people. Please keep sharing with us. Be safe out there.

Things are happening fast now!

6/30/17 4:00 am local

Well, as I have to try and stay awake so as not to mess up my sleep schedule, it seems as good a time as any for an update. We're now sitting in Petaluma, California waiting till 8:00 am for the receiver to unload the frozen chicken we brought them. I'm blown away looking at the times on my own posts and realizing that I was sitting at a rail yard in Atlanta, Ga just 56 hours ago!

So, in that time, we left Atlanta with a load of carpeting that was headed for Salt Lake City. Somewhere outside of New Baden, Illinois we received word that we were going to have to perform a "re-power". We met another team at a truck stop and swapped our trailer full of carpets for their refrigerated trailer full of frozen chicken that was headed for Petaluma, California. Along this route from Atlanta to Petaluma we've: Discovered that Kentucky and southern Illinois are absolutely gorgeous (especially in the early morning hours). My wife dodged storms coming through Nebraska and then, in mid-Nebraska, I took over after dark and drove right through some major thunderstorms between there and Cheyenne, Wyoming. My wife got her first taste of a major downgrade between Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. Played some slots and took showers in Sparks, Nevada. I took over driving right at sunset in Sparks and started my shift by driving Donner Pass, in the dark and through major construction, for the first time, as everyone slept. (Well, technically the trainer stayed awake as far as the weight station and agricultural check point before saying "You've got this. I trust you" and crashing out himself.)

By 1:00 pm local today we'll have come full circle. After we get this load unloaded we'll run to have the trailer washed/sanitized and then well be picking up a load of Foster Farms in, of all places, Salinas, California! We'll immediately take that load and head back to Tennessee.

It's been one crazy (and exhausting) week!

Can I type from the passenger seat while moving?

7/10/17 11:30 Eastern

Since it's been ten days since my last update, let's find out! So we have now crossed the country five times and are about a third of the way on our sixth. In addition we've spent a great deal of time running loads around and throughout the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. My wife and I logged 7008 miles in one seven day stretch and are now two thirds of the way through our required training hours. Incidentally, we're currently on a training salary but had we have been on miles we would have been paid for 7930 miles that week simply because of the way in which the loads fell and were submitted! We expect to be going in for our upgrade testing in about ten days or so and anticpate passing and receiving our own truck without issue.

So what have we been doing the past ten days? Well, aside from laying down a ton of miles, we've enjoyed several trucking perks and are still having one hell of an adventure! We picked up a load of lettuce in Salinas, that put us at a gross weight of around 77,500, and hauled it to just outside Nashville, Tennessee. We then hauled frozen chicken back to Los Angeles. Then it was miscellaneous refrigerated items to Gordonsville, Virginia. That was followed by a couple short runs, one of which was a light load of Amazon products and the other was 44,409 lbs of magazines that were fresh off the press. We're now hauling fiber optic cabling of some sort from Georgia to Salt Lake City, Utah and are, at this very moment, about to cross the border from Illinois into St. Louis, Missouri. We'll be stopping in about fifteen minutes and I'll drive the night away.

We've stopped in Morristown, Tennessee and had a wonderful afternoon and evening with our trainers family in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains. We were able to stop in Huntersville, North Carolina and spend an evening with my wife's parents, who we hadn't seen in three years. Every time the truck stops it seems the folks around us are speaking with a different accent. We've gotten to peek behind the curtain of numerous industries, having seen the inside of massive Amazon distribution centers, huge printing operations, chicken processing facilities and refrigerated distribution centers.

That's all for now, time to drive!

Training Nearly Complete!

Monday, July 17th - Hutchins, Tx - 4:30am local

Almost exactly one week since my last update and, as it turns out, I've got some time to burn. We've now crossed the country about seven and a half times and are on the very tail end of our training. We each need about two more shifts and we'll have met all the necessary training requirements and will be dropped at the main terminal in Chattanooga, probably Thursday, to begin final testing. After that we'll be assigned our own truck and will be given a load to our home area where we'll take about six days of much needed home time, outfit our new truck, and finally be able to get our dog! From there we'll be on our own! As much as we love our trainer we are SOOO ready to be on our own and develop our own routine! My intention will be to keep this thread running well into the first year of our driving, though posts will likely become less frequent. I'll be posting details on the upgrade testing, which I think will be valuable, and I want the thread to reflect such things as wether we get the miles and make the money we anticipated when initially planning all this. Our trainer assures us that we will be getting the same kinda loads and miles after we upgrade as we've gotten during training and we have learned that it was no accident that he was designated as our trainer. Apparently we are being groomed to run precisely as we have been and will run a lot of refrigerated loads with some high-security and high-value dry van loads thrown in here and there. Ironically it doesn't seem as though we'll being doing much hazmat. If that all proves true then we should find ourselves actually doing better financially during the first few months than we had anticipated, but I'll be sure to report how it actually pans out.

So, what have we done the past week? Honestly, it's beginning to blur together to the point that I now have to pull out my logs and remind myself! We finished that load into Salt Lake City and then grabbed a refrigerated trailer and headed up to Logan, Utah to make the first of two cheese pick-ups. The drive up to Logan is absolutely gorgeous! As seems to be all to commonly the case, we got a little tied up at the shipper in Logan due to not having the correct pick-up numbers and then proceeded to Fillmore, Utah for the second cheese pick-up. In Fillmore we again discovered we had not been given the correct pick-up numbers by dispatch and ended up spending the night as it got worked out. No matter, it was a beautiful place to stop and the weather was perfect for a change. (Apparently this is a new account and actually belongs to a sister company, hence the confusion on the numbers.) We finally got out of there and delivered in Pomona, California. From Pomona we picked up a load of organic produce in Colton, Ca and delivered to a Walmart distribution center in Shelbyville, Tennessee. From Shelbyville we departed for La Vergne, Tennessee where we picked up a UPS load and delivered in Irving, Texas about 8 hours ago. We now have a pre-plan to pickup a FedEx load in Fort Worth, Tx and deliver it on the north side of Chicago, unfortunately, we discovered a blown hub seal upon arriving in Irving. We're now sitting here at a terminal in Hutchins, Texas waiting on the shop to open in order to have it replaced. As it should be a quick fix, we anticipate being able to make our pickup and head to Chicago but we'll see here in about an hour or two. After that we'll likely get a load heading back to Tennessee and will complete our training and be dropped off to test out.

So that's it guys. For those following along, I'll be sure to give a detailed account as to what is involved in the whole testing out and upgrade process as well as the process of being issued a truck. Stay tuned!

An overdue update!

On our first home time - California - August 1st

A lot to report here over the past couple weeks! I'll do my best to cover the portions that would be pertinent to those seeking to go down this road themselves. We got out of Hutchins and finished our run to Libertyville, Illinois. From there we received the final load of our training that had us arriving at the main terminal in Tennessee on the evening of Wednesday, July 19th. Our trainer got us checked into the hotel and met us at the terminal the following morning where we checked in for our upgrade testing. My wife literally cried while saying goodbye to our trainer, something I find amazing as, from all the stories we'd been told, we should have been celebrating the end of multiple weeks of hell. Upon checking in the office lady noticed that my wife looked absolutely beat and gave us the option of beginning our four day upgrade process on Friday the 21'st...we elected to take that option. We put the morning to good use by taking the time to meet our fleet managers in person and then proceeded to the hotel to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Upgrade testing

Upgrade testing turned out to be more training than it was testing. The trainers were a combination of individuals who ran the yard and were dedicated trainers, and OTR trainers who were filling in as yard trainers while in the terminal for various reasons. Once again I have to say that we were thoroughly impressed first and foremost by the people. Everyone at this company actually seems to give a damn! From the ex-drill seargent dedicated trainers, to the OTR drivers who got stuck having to train us green peas, everyone was great! We spent three days in a training yard where we learned maneuvers such as the 180˚ back. This is simply a maneuver in which you begin with a line of barrels along the drivers side of the vehicle and must back untill your tandems reach the last barrel, pivot 180˚ around that barrel, and end up facing the other direction with the barrels again on the drivers side. I actually found this maneuver rather fun as it was something completely new. We also practiced maneuvers ranging from basic turns, to offset lane changes, to 45˚ alley docks. Day three was spent on final testing. In order to test out of the yard we had to perform four 45˚ alley docks between trailers, in succession, within one hour. Of course this must be performed without hitting barrels, trailers, or having to be stopped by a trainer for any safety reason. I knocked mine out without any issue whatsoever. My wife suffered a bit of test anxiety and initially had to stop and go sit down to calm herself. She had spent the past four weeks doing this everyday and was good enough that she'd been parking in spots so tight that you couldn't walk between the trailers once we were parked, but nerves got the better of her. Once she calmed down she hammered out her four without issue. The culmination of this testing was essentially our successful upgrade as the following morning was simply spent in a classroom going over everything from payroll to company policies.

Upgrade to our Upgrade

We not only lucked out by having a great trainer but lucked out in that he is one of the few dedicated reefer trainers within the company and has an excellent reputation. In addition he was going to bat for us in a big way and singing our praises to our fleet managers and company management. Throughout training we came to the conclusion that we wanted to remain running the semi-dedicated refrigerated runs that we'd been running with our trainer. (This will involve coast-to-coast reefer runs with numerous dry-van runs, of all types, thrown in as necessary to get us back to a coast-to-coast reefer run.) It was explained to us that after our initial upgrade we'd be required to put in a minimum of six months before we'd qualify to upgrade to reefer. As it turned out we were invited to take the reefer class, and go through the necessary interviews, immediately after lunch on our fourth day. We did so and ended up being upgraded to semi-dedicated reefer, and coded as such in the system, within four hours of being upgraded to drivers! This was all being done as other members of our upgrade class gave us dirty looks and were clearly wondering how we managed to pull it off!

Truck assignment

As the latter part of our upgrade was happening our trainer was flown to California to pick up a truck and a student. As it turned out the truck he was bringing back was cherry. It's an exceptionally clean 10 spd Freightliner with 120k and a direct tv system and inverter pre-installed. He went to bat for us again and we ended up with a hand-picked truck!

First runs on our own

Our first run was a dry-van of Little Debbie's which departed Tennessee and delivered in Kingman, Az. (The folks at Little Debbie's offered us a job! Lol!) We delivered several hours early and without issue. The second was an Amazon load from Arizona to Tracy, California. Amazon loaded us 6000lbs overweight on our tandems (when set at Ca limit) but after a five hour re-work we also delivered that load without a hitch.

Home Time

We're now on home time till Fri 8/4. We're outfitting the truck for the long term and have installed a CB as well as obtaining a Mack-daddy custom mattress. We'll also be adding a 12volt cooler prior to taking off again.

As always, wish us luck!

Congrats guys..... I will love to see pictures of your pimped up home lol

I’m Pretty Sure We’re Officially Truckers Now!

Seeing as how it’s been over three months now it would be easy for anyone now reading this thread to assume that we had gone the way of the dodo like so many other new drivers. Quite the contrary!

We have now traveled 36 states, most multiple times, and logged almost exactly 70,000 miles on our own (in addition to our training mileage). We’ve routinely run reefer and dry van , high security and high value. We’ve been dispatched to shippers and receivers on rural farms and chicken ranches as well as those located in urban areas such as downtown LA or Dallas, during rush hour no less. We’ve been placed on many of the most major accounts our company has over the past several months and have completed all runs with zero safety violations, and with zero service failures. We even added “interstate drug runners” to our resumes at one point by transporting high value and high security pharmaceuticals that had to be aimlessly driven around for ten hours to prevent the possibility of being hijacked while we waited for the receiver to open. As such we have recently been placed on a temporary dedicated account for the holidays, running time sensitive freight through the northern states, despite it being our first winter. In fact we have been asked at times to serve as discretionary drivers, scouting out the weather and reporting conditions for others following in our tracks. We’ve traveled through the remnants of each one of the major hurricanes that have hit the country, through the smoke of many of the major fires, and over most of the passes most often talked about. We’ve crossed the country east-to-west, west-to-east, north-to-south, south-to-north and diagonally more times than we can keep track of without looking back at logs. Things that turned our knuckles white and clenched our cheeks just a few months ago, are now just par for the course. It’s rather insane just how rapidly things have changed and truly hard to believe that just nine months ago neither of us had ever been behind the wheel of a big rig! In spite of all this, there is a new sight to see, a new challenge to face, and something new to learn virtually every day!

A Little On How Our Preliminary Expectations Are Panning Out

Our Choice of Company

We continue to be absolutely thrilled with our choice of company and, at this point, it would require a pretty sweet deal to convince us to go elsewhere. From the moment we established a reputation with our trainer we have been treated like gold ever since. We’ve never experienced an unreasonable issue with getting home for home time and in fact have been offered to take more time if we need it. If we need time between loads to shop, do laundry, or whatever, we simply say so. Our pay has always been correct and our raises have come with our upgrades right on schedule. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always some irritation with skeleton night or weekend crews, but nothing that should come as any surprise to anyone who has previously been involved in the corporate world. Our company is geared toward teams and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for someone intending to go solo. That being said, if you’re a “natural team” (meaning coming in as relatives or friends who already know each other) and you have questions, feel free to ask me and we can arrange to speak privately.

The Money

For the most part the money is exactly what we expected it to be prior to starting school (at this point) and I’m confident we’ll continue to see it increase. Much of the financial end comes down to our own decisions as drivers. What type of account we’re on and how we manage our time makes all the difference in the world at the end of the week. For example, at times we’ve taken a reset when we didn’t absolutely have to simply because we were plum whooped. Other times you’re forced into a reset because you didn’t manage your time in such a manner as to allow you to continue to run on recaps. As you become more familiar with how it all works you become more efficient and with that the income increases, at least that’s how it’s working for us so far.

You also have to take it on an average. There will be many things beyond your control and you’ll just have to let it roll off your back and have a better week next week. For example, I have ample time to write now as we are in just such a predicament. We were running west bound I-80 through Wyoming early this past Friday attempting to beat incoming winter weather conditions and arrive in Troutdale, Oregon late Friday night. Needless to say the weather set in quicker than Wyoming DOT was predicting and I-80 was shut down right in front of us. We immediately got off at the Little America to wait it out and received word they were opening back up three hours later. Twenty miles later we found ourselves on solid ice and stuck in traffic caused by an accident ahead. As we sat there our company declared an in-house mandatory shutdown for the area (we don’t run on ice). Needless to say all this delayed our arrival to early this morning (a Sunday) and put us in a situation of having to wait till Tuesday morning to get our run back! Nearly 3 days running lost when all’s said and done. Oh well, such is trucking! Time to stock up, get some good food, catch up on Netflix, do a little Christmas shopping, write a blog post, and maybe even show the wife some love!

Till next time guys!

That was a great read! Thank you for sharing your experience with us. My wife and I both got our cdl earlier this year. We plan on going team later on, but our two boys need us for a few more years. I am looking forward to reading your future updates. Stay safe out there.

In A Big Company...It’s All About The Fleet Team!

For a while now I’ve been thinking it was time to post an update. Initially I had planned to talk about some of the pre-conceived notions we had prior to getting into the industry versus what the realities are out here. Then this happened....

We’ve been out for approximately seven weeks now and will be taking home time next week. About two weeks into this run we began hearing rumors through the grapevine that the company was about to initiate a major scrambling of their fleet teams, resulting in most drivers being transferred to entirely new teams. This was a major nerve wracking prospect as we had developed an excellent relationship with our fleet team and have heard horror stories about how bad things can go when this happens. We even personally know folks who have quit other companies after just such a change up. It was for this very reason that we wouldn’t even consider taking other opportunities within the company, such as a dedicated route , as doing so meant losing our trusted fleet team.

We immediately called our dispatchers and discovered they were planning to call us and inform us of the change that evening. As it turned out we were to be assigned to our new fleet team beginning the following day!! Our original team assured us that our new team had been fully informed that we were their best team and we were told all we had to do was keep doing what we’d been doing and all would be fine. On our side the plan was to keep calm, hope for the best, and cross our fingers that the last ten months of paying our dues and building relationships wasn’t completely erased. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s been going.

Upon being assigned to our new team we were currently in the process of delivering on multiple trip plans remaining from our previous team. We received no “welcome to the new team” message or call. We finally arrived at our receiver in Olney, Illinois, and completed the prior trip plans, at 2:00am on a Saturday morning. We then proceeded to sit there for THREE DAYS waiting on our next load! In fact we sat for seven out of the next eleven days. (To be fair, one day was for a minor mechanical issue and one was for weather. The other five and a half however were waiting on loads to be dispatched.) In the weeks to come we ran into multiple issues in which we would arrive at shippers only to have them look at us like we had three heads and wonder why we were there. On one occasion we arrived at our appointment to find that our fleet team had the date wrong and the actual appointment was for the next day...so we sat for 24 hours. On another we arrived to discover the load we were to pick up had been picked up by another carrier...8 DAYS earlier! (They even commented “Your dispatch is all screwed up!”.) Just a couple days ago we actually had to stop in the middle of the night and put our foot down, telling dispatch that the truck would not move any further until such time as they provide us with a trip plan that accurately depicted what we had been verbally, or through messages, instructed to do. We’ve also seen multiple errors in the trip plans themselves that we were able to overcome simply because we had the correct information via messages from the planners. More than anything we’ve had the distinct impression that we have returned to being nobodies and that the past ten months of building a reputation was all for not! None of this was ever an issue with our previous team.

Now to add insult to injury, we had been told we’d be able to keep our truck (which we loved) for another 150k miles, or so, as long as it didn’t start developing issues. Last week however we received a trip plan to head to corporate headquarters and drop a load. Our A/C had been lacking oomf recently so we asked if the shop could take a look at it while we were there and at that time were informed that we wouldn’t need to worry about it as we were coming in to be assigned a new truck. We asked if there was any way we could be issued a manual, knowing it’s all going automatic, and we were told it shouldn’t be a problem as the automatics were being reserved for the new drivers coming in with licenses restricted to automatics. What we got was a brand new (150 miles on it and still plastic wrapped) 2018 Freightliner Cascadia...automatic.

-continued-

Now, despite this being an automatic, one would think this would be an exciting moment! I mean a BRAND NEW truck...cool right? Wrong! Have you seen the movie Lost In Space? You know the scene where they are launching the Jupiter 2 spacecraft and the pilot says “And the monkey flips the switch”? Yeah well, let’s just say we’ve named our new truck “Jupiter” (we left out the “2” as it would be insulting to our previous truck). This truck does everything for you to the point that my 16 year old could drive it. What’s more is that they have disabled all driving modes other than the economy mode, so it’s not just an automatic but a neutered automatic! In addition to this they told us they would not be able to install our inverter until May or June due to needing some part. This means we lost all the fun and challenge of driving a truck while simultaneously losing the ability to cook or watch tv . As the night driver, this truck is every bit as boring to drive through the night as I feared it would be. Now, as though that’s not sufficient reason to be bummed, this truck has some serious design flaws for a husband/wife team. For one thing the storage sucks and we are now a mobile storage unit and planning how we can get rid of about 25% of our stuff on home time next week (fortunately we don’t need cooking supplies anymore). Secondly the sleeping arrangement sucks. My wife and I “spend time” together in the lower bunk while on resets or waiting on loads but I will typically sleep in the upper bunk when stopped for extended periods. The upper bunk has significantly reduced headroom. The only way to access the upper bunk is from the fold down ladder which can not be raised or lowered by the person in the upper bunk. This ladder effectively cages in the person in the lower bunk and blocks access to cupboards as it is located dead center, so naturally, my wife wants it up as much as possible. This in turn means I’m stuck up there till she puts it down. (Or I can do gymnastics trying to get into a position to slide down without anywhere to place my feet.) The ladder was apparently also designed for someone with boots on as it sure as hell wasn’t designed for a bare foot person about to go to bed. Oh, and god forbid my wife decides to turn on the fancy new lighting system while I’m asleep as I’ll wake up feeling like I’m in a tanning bed!

Anyhow, *****, *****...I know. There is a bright side. We left on this last run feeling thoroughly satisfied with our company and truck and are now about to head home feeling as though we’ve gone to work for a completely new company. As such, the sky is now the limit! While we didn’t want to make any changes, thereby fixing something that wasn’t broken, we now have nothing to lose. We’ve spoken with our old dispatch and have been told we can pick and choose from anything we want to do within the company due to coming up on a full year of zero service failures and zero safety violations. Anything but go back to them that is as, because they were such a good team they have now been tasked with handling only new drivers and those who are problem drivers. (We almost feel sorrier for them than ourselves.) We’ve also been offered numerous opportunities with other companies and, in fact, have a friend working for a small company out of Minnesota that would offer us significantly higher pay, quality equipment, and the ability to run super-solo if we so desire. (We’ll know more about that next week.) Any way you cut it we will definitely finish out our full year with our current company but the concept of making a switch that would allow us to learn more about the industry, and potentially make more money doing so, is becoming quite appealing. It sucks however because it was never our intention to think of our company as a “starter company”. We’re even exploring the option of getting some flatbed experience and in fact literally just spent the past hour talking to a gentleman with 37 years of flatbedding experience who gave us several leads. My wife and I have considerable experience running our own business, could buy a truck tomorrow if we desired, and are very much self motivated individuals, so a progression towards an independent owner-op situation is not out of the question (despite the dire warnings...though a great deal of homework is still required.)

Anyhow, gotta get rolling again but that’s where we happen to be at for the moment folks.