My tribute to OTR truck drivers

Though all truck drivers play a big role delivering all our goods and materials to factories, warehouses, and stores I really want to focus on OTR driver. Over the Road drivers are one that drive 48 states and are gone for days or weeks from home. A truck drivers life is so different then a regular job. You sleep in the back of a truck, you eat out of a cooler or at a restaurant all the time, and your away from home for weeks. When you are home you are only home for a short while, maybe only a day or two. You have deadlines to meet, federal regulations to obide, driving hours to calculate, mileage to figure. At time you are super busy getting loads to where they need to go. Other time you may sit at a truck stop for a few days waiting on a load close to the area you in to take.

When I was 5 months pregnant with Gretchen I went on the road with Brian for two weeks. After a day or two you get used to the booping around in the truck. Being on the road made me come to appreciate and understand the life of a trucker. It can be exciting sometime. You get to visit different places and see different things. However at time all you see is interstate. Going through some states is so boring. All you see is fields and barns. Brian liked to start work early. You see a trucker can drive up to 11 hrs a day and ever so many days they have to take a break of like 35 hrs I think. So if we started around 6 am and stopped a few times to break then we could stop around 6 pm. This is the perfect time to find a spot at a truck stop. If you stop much later you might not find an empty spot and then you are parking on the side of the road for the night. But really a truck drivers life is crazy. For one thing if you want to take a shower at a truck stop its going to cost you $10. Brian even had a camping shower in his truck. Some towns out west don't have truck stops so we resorted to a cold shower in the truck. Eating at a truck stop can be expensive and the food isn't that great. The worst part of trucking is that up north most states won't let you idle your truck. This means that you won't have any air in your truck when its 100 degree weather outside. Some truck stops have these things you hook up to your truck called idle air that provides air and heat so you don't have to idle your truck but this is very expensive.

Finding a good trucking job with a good company isn't always easy. Because of cost of insurance most want experience. Some require different things. For example some need you to tarp your truck, maybe unload it, or deal with sales. For Brian the hardest thing was being away home. Now he has a job with Truck Services. He took a position working around 3 to 4 days a week. Yes he has to be gone but he is home on weekends to be with me and the kids and he gets more then 36 hrs off. There are trucking companies that 36 hrs is all you get to be home a week and then you are back on the road.

I love my truck driver. Everyone should appreciate truck drivers more. So next time you so buy a soda think about how a truck driver picked up those empty cans in Wyoming and drove 3 days across county to South Carolina to a soda factory where they put the soda in the cans so that you could have a refreshing drink.