How did a 50-something,carefully brought up mother from London, England find herself driving an 18 wheeler across The United States? It ended up being so much more complicated than one would think. However, adventures are adventures and hiccups are where the stories lay… November 26, 2011 at 2:26 pm
What would make a fifty-something, nicely brought-up mother all of a sudden opt to drive a truck?
It’s a good question and, like the majority of good questions it had answers both easy and complex. From ‘it sounds like fun’ through ‘it’s a conventional immigrant job’ via ‘well, earn more money in a truck than I can with a Master’s degree’ with a detour along ‘I’ve driven ambulances and stretch limos, if I would like to get bigger it’s either a truck or even a plane and this course is cheaper’…none of these reasons quite encapsulated it all.
And these were merely the rationalisations for the much vaguer pull towards the massive beasties that I’d been looking at on the highway ever since emigrating from the UK to Canada. There was no rationalisation obviously for that other vague pull, a lifelong obsession with doing things merely because they are slightly peculiar.
Adding to my list of reasons that it appeared to be a great angle for a book on trucking assisted just a little when trying to explain to people who have no imagination, although not much.
To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected fear when I breezed into Tri-County Truck Driver Training one afternoon in 2008. I simply needed to understand what it took to become a trucking lady. I wanted to discover North America, how hard could it be?
Needless to say there is a slight distinction between finding out how to handle a 75-foot, slow-moving guided missile and dreaming of getting money to see the continent; and actually earning a living. Spending 14 hours per day smelling of diesel. My first job was taking trailers full of mail from East to West. Team driving across Canada’s endless prairies and through The Rockies, and sometimes getting lucky enough to return via Texas. That Lake Effect Winter Storm was just an example of our countless weather-related narrow squeaks. North American trucking can be quite the adventure.
I’ve been almost arrested in Baltimore, sick as a dog in Tennessee, terrified in Chicago, Dallas and Detroit and dug out from the snow twice within a night in Alberta. I’ve made buddies in Virginia and enemies here at home. And, given half a chance, I’d probably forget all about how impossibly exhausting it is and set off again to take 18 wheels over the horizon.