I've been a trucker for the last ten years but now I am back home at "Camp Chaos" and I will be working at the Fontana terminal as a safety specialist. I hope now that I'm home I'll have a lot more time for blogging!


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Wednesday March 30, 2005, 3:45 pm, I’m sitting in the jump seat, my student is at the wheel. We are driving across Tennessee. A gorgeous day… 83 degrees… everything is turning green after all the rain they’ve had back here. It’s easy to type on the laptop through Tennessee, the roads are very good. That’s more than can be said for lots of other states! I will upload this to the blog when we get to Nashville TN this evening.

We have the bible on CD, read by Alexander Scourby. We started Genesis last week and are now in Judges. My student and I are enjoying listening. It is sooo much easier than reading yourself, and I can blog while I’m listening.

Our trip to Boston was pretty uneventful, Sunday night, we dropped our load of bamboo cutting boards, picked up an empty trailer that originally we were told was to be taken somewhere to pick up a load going back to North Las Vegas NV. Well we waited all day Monday, sitting in a Target parking lot because there are no truck stops in the entire Boston area. Finally, Tuesday morning we are told to take our empty trailer to North Bergen New Jersey to get loaded.

The roads in NJ were made for horse and buggies, not semi’s, 75 feet long. My student had a grand time dodging 4-wheelers, barely missing telephone poles that for some reason they sunk in the sidewalk right at the edge, on a curve, so we have to take up the whole street just so our trailer will clear it. The 4-wheelers(cars, in case anyone is wondering what a 4-wheeler is…you call us 18 wheelers we call you 4 wheelers).

So we finally find our shipper in North Bergen. (if anyone wants to find N. Bergen on the map, just find New York, look across the water to the west, you’ll see Jersey City, Union City, West New York, North Bergen. As is usual we had two sets of directions, both of them wrong. Fortunately I’ve been there before so we got there. My student decided it would be OK with him if they never send him to NJ at all. I think he said he is going to run just the 11 western states.

We dropped our empty trailer and hooked to a full trailer loaded with 1200 cartons of ?? The bills don’t say what’s inside… just 1200 ctn. We could be hauling anything. It is going to TJ Maxx/Marshalls so I don’t think we have anything unusual, probably cartons of French perfumes or underwear. The load weighs 27000 lbs, a perfect load. Heavy enough so the wind doesn’t bother us, light enough so the weigh stations ignore us. In fact we have a little gizmo, a little black box, glued to our windshield called a transponder. They weigh us at highway speed our little transponder sends who we are and the computer checks us to see if we are wanted felons and if everything checks out they give us a green light and we go flying by… best thing ever invented! Its called Pre-Pass, almost all the states have it now… we love it.

That’s all for now, I’m going to do a blog on what truck drivers eat…next blog

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What Truck Drivers Eat:

Too much!

Almost all the truck stop restaurants have buffets. They are great because not only do they have a good variety, a person can get a great meal and not have to wait for it to be cooked. That’s important when we have to be on the road in half an hour. Only problem with buffets… even though I don’t eat buffets everyday or even every other day, usually maybe twice a week I’ll do buffet. You get fat on buffets!!! I’m over 170 lbs now after starting out around 140 lbs 10 years ago. All because of buffets!!

So I decided to do something else. I would start cooking my own meals. Right in the truck.

I have a stove and a griddle, they run on little propane bottles, a 12 volt crock pot, a 12 volt cooler, and I take advantage of the fact that all truck stops have microwaves available to drivers.

So, take yesterday for example:

I bought a package of cut up chicken thighs from a Wal-Mart Supercenter

About 4:00 pm I put the chicken in the pot. I dusted the thighs with a package of dry Hidden Valley Dressing and seasoning mix and plugged the crock pot into the cigarette lighter.

At about 6:00 we stopped at a truck stop for dinner. I set up the little propane stove carefully on my bed, it comes in its own carrier so it is safe to set on any surface, opened a window to let in oxygen, and cut up an onion. Chopped it into little pieces. Then with a little olive oil in the frying pan I sautéed the onion. When the onion was tender I cut up two zucchini’s, also from Wal-Mart (88 cents a lb!) and added them to the onions. I poured a half cup of water on the mix and put the lid on and let it simmer for awhile. Oh I forgot to mention, I also dumped a little garlic powder into the mix.

Just as the zucchini was getting tender, though still a little crunchy, I drained off the excess water, then I sprinkled shredded jack and Colby cheese over the whole thing to melt.

It was a perfect dinner, chicken and zucchini. Better than any buffet and low carb!

I enjoy cooking for my students. I want them to know there are alternatives to greasy truck stop food.

Sometimes I’ll make cheese burgers on my propane griddle. I make pancakes too. That’s after cooking a few sausage patties and three eggs, over easy.

I eat good… maybe it’s the cab cooking that is why I’m gaining some weight. I don’t know.

I bought a jump rope. That sounded like a good way to get some exercise. Only problem, can you imagine me standing in front of my truck with 100 other drivers watching me, jumping rope? I’ve had the jump rope for a year now and I’ve jumped rope twice with it. So that’s not working.

A couple of weeks ago my wife, Brenda, and I were at South Coast Plaza and I saw the perfect solution to my lack of exercise. Sharper Image had a stair stepper that was only about 8 inches square. Perfect for the truck. I will have to get it!

That’s all for now,
Tom
posted by Tom at 4:09 PM