Swift Trucking Adventure

It has been a long time since I posted anything on this blog, or for that matter on my Adventure blog.
After getting my CDL I really started working and really had no time for posting.
I'm going to post this and a few more post here at this blog and decide what to do from this point on.
I will probably just leave this one up for a while, and see if anybody is interested.

So Much has changed since I lost my job at the auction. My new job took me away from home for almost 2 years, and in Sept. 2012 my cute Girlfriend got transferred up to Kelso Wa so that is now where home is.

After getting my CDL I went to Swift Transport to see how Over the Road Trucking was.  Swift is one of a few Trucking Companies that will take green drivers and send them out with another experienced driver to learn the ropes. I went to Phoenix and spent a week there learning how Swift did things. I was trying to get into Flatbed work because it pays slightly more, although the load and unload can be hell. After Training in Phoenix I was sent home to await a driver to ride with.  I waited for almost 2 weeks before that happened.

Swift then send me on the start of my adventure, by bus.  I can not tell you how bad going from point A to point B by bus is. Smelly people, bus drivers that can't drive, long unpleasant waits. It was not fun.
I remember going out through the California Desert and this small male Asian bus driver weaved the whole way to Phoenix. I confronted him in Blyth Ca. to see if he was tired. He said he wasn't. I sat in the back and watched all the passengers heads move back and forth as this dumb ass rolled down the road moving the nose of the bus all over the lane. When we got to Phoenix the connecting bus was 5 hours late so I couldn't get to El Paso, my destination to meet the training driver, so I spent the night in Phoenix's crappy bus station, didn't sleep a wink. Long story short I arrive in El Paso 11 hours late and we had to start our training the next day.

I met the training driver a nice African American gentleman name Carlos.  Now I must admit that while traveling there I had thought that with me heading to El Paso Texas to meet a man named Carlos I would be spending the next month with a Latino Gentleman.  Carlos was a good guy and a good trainer, my one complaint with him would have been the fact that he listened to his Rap Music too F'ing loud. Our first load was going from El Paso to Providence RI. That was a pretty long drive. It June when we started this and we spend most of my time with him in the southern states where it was very hot and muggy.

You start this trucking thing thinking you will get to see some things along the way. Not so. Driving truck is basically driving down a black top road in the dark or down a tree sided highway. I heard the drivers call it the "big green tunnel", and that is what it was.

We did go through Colorado one time and we did get to stop at a place outside of Moab UT near and arch.

This was the Wilson Arch.

I have a funny story about this arch. My Trainer Carlos has this big screen TV set up right over the driver area that folded down some so he could sit back and watch movies and also see out the front window. He also had a video game console. Well one night a week or so before I took this picture we had passed through this area at night. Carlos had been playing some game called "LA Noire"  It is this detective first person shooter game that is hinged around the Black Dahlia murders in LA in the late 1940's.  It has all this creepy music and all the shooting and car chases, that after a few hours make you feel kind of spooky.
So I'm driving us out in this area and I'm lamenting in my head how it would be so cool to actually see this area in the daylight and I see the sign for this Wilson Arch. It was dark outside and we were in a canyon of some sort but I lookout the driver side window anyways wondering what the arch looked like. Just as I look out, there is the silhouette of the arch with a full moon sitting inside the middle of it.  There was this big creepy eye looking back at me as the spooky music from the game played...lol  I didn't expect the moon to be there when I looked, it had been hidden by the canyon walls. I thought about it for a little bit and figured it was pretty cool and the timing was pretty comical, let alone the whole cosmic alignment thing...lol

So I drove all over the US for a little more than a month. Mean while before I left I had taken a few endorsement tests and had only had the temp paper license to show Swift Trucking and it was about to run out. The whole time I was out on the road my buddy Kevin had been calling me and texting me saying I needed to come up to North Dakota because there was tons of high paying jobs up there. I was thinking it was a long shot to go to North Dakota, and I was just about to get my own truck with Swift and wasn't sure how I could go to ND at this juncture.  Well Swift called on my last day of driving "teams" and had me in non Driver Status and had told me that it would be almost a month before they could get me a truck.

Providence anyone. So Carlos gets me back to my house in loverly Hesperia Ca and I tell the cute Girlfriend that I'm going to give this N. Dakota thing a try because Swift is taking so long.  I thought it was a long shot and cute girlfriend was not very happy about it, but it beat sitting around the house waiting and if it didn't pan out I could race back and get with Swift.

I loaded up the fuel saving Geo Metro I own and drove up to ND. Damn what a drive. I showed up there at my friends work and they hired me on the spot for about triple what I would have got from Swift.

I will continue this story on my adventure blog.  I started this blog thinking I would be on the road and it would be a good way to have my friends and family know where I'm at. My path changed and I won't have much in the way of trucking to talk about.

I will leave you with some more pictures I took on the road.

This is part of the stage for the Dave Matthews band....The stage hands had overloaded this trailer and it had crappy tires on it.  We were overweight and blew 2 tires on Dave's Trailer in West Virginia and had to wait under and overpass for 16 hours to get some new ones...we cussed at Dave every time we heard or saw his name...lol

 

We picked up this heave Machinery in a very crappy part of Detroit MI.  I saw some of the most ramshackle areas I saw in all of the US here.  It was sad to look at some of the old stone and brick homes and apartments from the 1920's and 30's all run down and falling down...drove this load all the way back to Phoenix.

This is a land mark in New Mexico called "Shiprock",  It is on Reservation Land and is sacred and you can not climb it. I guess the early European Settlers thought is looked like a tall sailing ship at a distance as they moved along this high desert area in their covered wagons. Shiprock is near the Four Corners area of the New Mexico.

Here it is up close. Well maybe 8 miles away...lol  There are some pictures on Google Earth you can click on of this rock that sneaky people have climbed.

A Spire of sand stone on the Arizona side of the Four Corners area.  This is Navajo country near Monument Valley that is just north in Utah. A few John Ford and John Wayne movies have been filmed in this area.

Next installment will be on the Larsen Adventure Chronicles.