Road Trip 3 - Meeting Wyatt Earp

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The legend of Wyatt Earp begins in Dodge City, which is in south-central Kansas. The "Queen of the Cow Towns," Dodge City was a nexus for enormous cattle drives heading to markets like Chicago. Earp's history before then was rather speckled and inglorious, but in Dodge he started to make a name for himself, and the city celebrates that.

The first time I drove through Dodge City was in a truck. I happened upon a pull-over next to a huge cattleyard, so I stopped and took some pictures. Seemed to me, both while I was there and after I drove past the bypass, that there was nothing much to see in Dodge except a fancy town sign, that cattleyard, and a bunch of cattle-carriers filling the lot of a local truckstop which, at the time, served large, locally grown steaks. But later, I had another chance to go through town and discovered I'd been deceived. There's a whole, thriving, modern town to be found, not to mention a tourist trap around the original Boot Hill! I couldn't stop then, but some day, I could come back. That day was today. (You know what I mean.)


We departed Oklahoma City bright and early and made our way northwest into Kansas. That part of the country is largely cornfields and rolling hills, with the occasional gully thrown in for good measure. I grew up in the flattest part of Indiana, and here in Florida it's at least as flat, so when people tell me states like Kansas and Iowa are flat, I just laugh and think they have no idea what flat is.

Miles and miles of miles and miles is pretty if you haven't seen them in a while; there's a lot of forest and swamp in Florida, not a whole lot of cornfields and such, and the grass is a different color than I'm used to, so it's pretty for the first couple hours. But eventually, one patch of ground looks like another, and road-hypnosis gets you where you're going.

We came in from the south, from where you can tell there's at least some kind of town. We stopped at the truckstop, which has since been bought up by Flying J (which itself has since been taken over by Pilot) hoping to get one of those big steaks I had the first time I came to town. But such was not to be, so we lunched over at the cattleyard and watched that for a while. It's not as boring as you'd think, unless you've never sat down in your life. Fortunately the wind was to our backs too.

Then we went back into town, and lo and behold, it was still a thriving town. When I'd driven through in a truck, I hadn't had the chance to get a good look. I just knew there was some kind of information center and some kind of special building to look at, and the town's style is very quaint on the main street. But now that we had a chance to stop, we discovered it was a full-blown tourist trap! I wanted t take a ride on the tour bus, which would've given us a one hour tour of the most important things to see in the town, but someone was afraid we wouldn't be able to drive 300 miles in under 8 hours on a high speed road, so the most we did was tromp around the area and take some pictures.

We couldn't stay long, so we headed out after almost an hour of looking around. I'll definitely come back one day and ride that tour bus and take my time seeing the town. Who's with me?

There were enough roadside historical markers between Dodge and Pueblo that we would've been stopping every 5-15 minutes most of the time, so since we were in a hurry, we had to pick and choose which ones were worth the stop. For instance, the Santa Fe Trail crossing was very informative.

Every time I come up on the mountains from the east (like what we were doing), I try to challenge myself to figure out from how far away I can spot them. And every time, I don't see them until I'm a lot closer than I think I should be, like about 30 miles away. Before that point, they are just dark shapes on the horizon easily dismissed as being part of the sky. Any snow on the mountains is dismissed as being clouds. For whatever reason, my mind simply can't see them until they're high enough to cause the sun to set an hour early. It's possible that the time of day has something to do with this. It's always the afternoon when I first come upon them, and that means the sun is on the other side, so it's not illuminating the near face any more. That keeps them darker, more sky-like. At least, that's the story I tell everyone who asks, which so far is just you guys.

Finally we made it to Pueblo, Colorado, where we could jump on I-25 and skip on up to Colorado Springs. Unsurprisingly, Sam and Dad had no difficulty figuring out which mountain was Pike's Peak. It was the big one, with the snow on it.

I'll tell you more about it next week.

And if you missed it, here's the start of our journey.

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Turtles with Warm Butts

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Similar style to the truck I drove, you can
see the space between mirror and cab.
This one's decked out like Optimus Prime!

I was watching an episode of American Dad a little while ago in which a rabbit and a tortise are having a race, and it reminded me of once when I was driving my semi-truck and, in the middle of the highway, there was a turtle trying to cross. He was just moving into my lane and I saw him just in time to dodge a little to the right. I wasn't sure if I'd miss him or not, but I looked in my rearview mirror at my trailer tires and saw them fly past the turtle closely enough to warm his butt without hitting him.

I was elated to see I'd managed to miss him when I didn't think I would. The feeling lasted about two seconds, until the car behind me ran him over.

And this reminds me of seeing birds performing death-defying dives at vehicles and flying out in front of them. One event in particular happened while I was driving a Peterbilt 379P, which has a boxy frame, narrow cabin, and prominent exhaust pipes on the sides. This bird flew right in front of my cabin as I was rolling at speed down the highway.

In the first instant, I thought, "That's gonna be close!" Next, it flew BETWEEN my mirror and the windshield, and I had an instant to think, "WOW! What a lucky bird!" Unfortunately, an instant later, the truck's wind shear trapped the bird and slammed it into the exhaust pipe with a clang. I don't expect he walked away from that one.

I've had a few other birds suicide on my windshield, but fortunately no big ones, like eagles. Hopefully that's more because they're smart than because they're rare. And a cousin of mine used to have a car which had deer run into it several times. I advised her to sell her deer magnet to a hunter.

I recall hearing a story of a trucker in Alaska whose way was blocked by a moose. He blew his horn to scare it off the road and, taking it as a challenge, the moose charged him and rammed the truck. So if a moose ever gets in your way, don't honk your horn at it. You probably shouldn't do that to buffalo either; forewarned, we didn't test their docility while we were at Yellowstone.

Over the course of May, I got to do some traveling out west. I took a ton of pictures, and I also took notes while we were out, so I've got a lot of story-telling for you, as soon as I get the time. Since I got back, I've been kind of busy, especially in the last couple weeks, writing on one of my books and working on one of my other personal projects, so I haven't had time to devote the usual level of attention to the site. (I've got half a dozen partially written articles awaiting some attention.) And so long as this roll keeps on rolling - I've written about 100 pages just in the past 2 weeks, and that's a lot - I'm going to continue to focus on it. I know you're all dying to see my books on your shelves as much as I'm dying to put them there.

I'm sure a lot of you are good at being creative on demand, but for me, when I get the bug, I have to do something with it before I lose it. It's like having a wonderful dream; if you don't write it down right when you wake up, you lose it. Sometimes even that isn't enough. So while I've got just about the whole book in my head itching to get out, I need to do as much writing on it as I can.

A lot of writers, once they manage to overcome their writer's block for long enough to get some things on paper, get bogged down in editing their work. They may initially decide the night was dark and stormy, then later realize it needed to be cold enough to snow, and that changes a few other things, and pretty soon, they're spending more time correcting the stuff they wrote earlier than writing new stuff. I get that urge too.

But I saw a very helpful piece of advice in a book about how to get a book written in 30 days: when moments like that come up, make a notation to yourself right there about what you want to change, and then continue on writing as if that change has been made. This allows you to continue with your stream of consciousness before you lose it, so you can get more written down. Then, when you're resting your creative muscles, you can go back and make those necessary changes.

Another thing that is invaluable is doing a LOT of reading for fun. I've recently met someone who hasn't ever done that, and so her writing and critiquing abilities are suffering for it. She's learning fast, but there are still a lot of things you can only learn by looking at the examples of other people's work. I may not know what most of the rules of grammar are called, but I largely know how they work. You won't often find a comma or apostrophe out of place in my writing, and my nouns always agree with their verbs. Tense, point of view, and that kind of stuff are second nature to me. Why? Not because I paid any attention in English class - no, my English teachers admired me only for my creativity, when I had the guts to show it - but rather because I did a LOT of reading as a kid, and continue to read as an adult.

Reading for enjoyment, not for business. If you want to know how to write an engaging piece of fiction, you have to read a lot of it. If you want to know how to write technical manuals, you have to read a lot of them. It's called practice. And so I've lent that friend some of my books so she can see how other people write and learn from their styles. Hopefully she'll enjoy them and not critique them.

So you're wondering what all this writing advice has to do with animals too dumb to try to avoid loud, fast-moving vehicles. So am I. Looks like a chain of things I was reminded of after watching TV.

Hope everyone had a happy Aphelion last Monday. I meant to write about it, but I was too busy dodging bottlerockets.

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Only in Ohio can you not Fly the Flag

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Being from northwest Indiana, I have a natural distrust for all things Buckeye. As a truck driver, I found justification for this when Ohio's laws required trucks to drive dangerously slow on the interstates. I felt like I should be using my flashers and orange triangle to warn cars that I was in a slow-moving vehicle because of how much slower I had to drive. And it didn't seem to be for any purpose other than as a money grab - either you spend an extra hour crossing the state, and are that much more likely to have to buy food and gas there, or you get a thousand dollar speeding ticket for trying to be less dangerous to the people around you. I'd heard the governor was even declining federal highway funds because the state made so much money off the truckers! And as a writer, I'm finding a disproportionate amount of wacky fans coming from Ohio.

And now, Ohio residents are attempting to forbid a man his right to fly a flag in front of his house.

Normally, something like this might spring up out of some hypocrite insisting he be allowed to blow up American citizens doing whatever he can to make everyone around him as miserable as he is, but this time, it's for a much more mundane reason: it's against the rules.

Who made a rule IN AMERICA that you can't fly the AMERICAN flag in front of your own house?


A home owner's association made such a rule.

In this story, we learn that a 77 year old veteran - a COMBAT veteran, no less - is going to be sued by his home owner's association if he doesn't take down the flagpole. He's not flying anything out of the ordinary or excessively showy; it's a standard pole and a standard flag.

As scary as it is that an HOA would have a rule forbidding flags, what's even scarier is that, instead of reconsidering how that rule breaks the law and that it should be changed, they think the solution is to waste money suing a veteran. A COMBAT veteran. Someone who literally risked his life to defend our liberties! Do the members of that HOA know? Do they approve of travesty?

I can't rag too much on Ohio, not just because I have some very good friends who live there who have no part in something so obscene, but because last year, there was something even worse going on in California, the state which is the root of most evil.

Last year, at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, on the fifth of May, a group of American kids wore American flag tee-shirts and then were suspended for it. Why should this matter? Because it just so happens that Cinco de Mayo is the Mexican equivalent to the Fourth of July, and it's celebrated on the 5th of May. A racist Mexican organization, stoically against the idea of harmony and unity with any other group, was putting on a celebration, wearing Mexican flag tee-shirts, and otherwise campaigning to have the American Southwest annexed to Mexico. As you can imagine, it was not a celebration of inclusiveness like Martin Luther King Day and Chinese New Year and Cinco de Mayo in the rest of the country. It was celebrate Mexico or GTFO.

The principal of the school asked those five American students to turn their shirts inside out, so as not to offend anyone. I'm sure it never occurred to him to do the same for anyone wearing non-American clothing on the Fourth of July, or non-Santa clothing on Christmas, or non-Orthidox clothing on an Orthidox holiday. When the students bravely refused, they were suspended.

Bravely? You may think I'm exaggerating, but refusing really was brave. Not because the principal was going to suspend them, but because the racist Mexican organization backing the day's celebrations, MEChA, is dangerous, and those students were literally taking their lives into their own hands by daring to wear the American flag within the school yard on that day. MEChA's own website declares its dangerous intentions toward our country! It's a domestic terrorist group!

Of course, you never heard about any of this, because we wouldn't want to offend hypocrites whose goal is the murder of our nation or its national pride.

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10-4 Good Buddy!

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It's that time of year again: National Talk like a Trucker Day!! Ahoy there mateys! Er, I mean, hit that hammer lane and watch out for the four-wheelers, you got bears in the air, gators on the zipper, and the chicken coop is open, so watch your back door for diesel weasels and stay out of the pickle park.

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Free Wifi Hotspots Accessible to Truckers (Updated)

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Do you drive a truck? Would you like to be able to access the internet for free? Are you sick and tired of the obscenely overpriced options that the big-chain truckstops offer? Then I've got good news for you!

In my travels about the country over the past 4 years, I've gathered together every location I could find that offered free WIFI access to truck drivers. This list has every truckstop and rest area with free wifi that I have encountered, plus a few I got from doing searches on the internet. There are probably still several I haven't found - in 2009 alone I discovered about 20 new ones, and I'm sure more and more of the small-timer truckstops are seeing the value in offering for free something that doesn't really cost them anything to provide. Contrast that with the exorbitant rates the major chains charge - several dollars an hour! - and it's easy to see why the small-timers are still in business.

Best of all, I'm posting this list for free! That's right, I did a ton of work, and I'm giving it away because I'm just that awesome!

I posted earlier renditions of this list before, but now that 2009 is over with, I think it's time I posted my latest rendition of the list of free wifi hotspots on my shiny new website. Consider this my Christmas and New Year's gifts to all you hard working truck drivers. Enjoy! And if you have any comments or information to share about this list, please feel free to let me know so I can keep this list up to date.

In the meantime, you can repay my kindness by passing the word out about my site, ok? Thanks!

Click here to see the list.

A couple caveats: I don't list motels and restaurants that aren't part of the truckstop, first because it's rude to use their wifi, second because in some places it might be illegal for you to do so, and third because sometimes they lock up their airwaves to keep unauthorized users off which would invalidate the list. Also, I don't list any malls or restaurants because you never know when someone's going to get offended about parting a truck in a mall parking lot.

There are a few restaurants scattered about that have their own truck parking lots and also offer free wifi. I didn't list these because most of these places don't want you parking overnight, or even for long periods, and as with malls, you never know when someone's going to get pissy about you parking there, so I'd rather not be the cause of unnecessary grief unless I'm going to profit big time from it. :-)

Most of you are probably well aware of what places like that you can park at or near anyway.

Last caveat: there are a few towns that have city-wide wifi. These were initially going to be free, but almost-free isn't quite free, and so they decided they needed to recoup the deployment costs. I've been to two of these towns, and both of them offered a 5-minute free usage, which was enough time to swap emails and proteins, and check the weather. No point in mentioning them if that's all you can do.

Below I've linked up a few netbooks available at Amazon, one of which is embarrassingly cheap. They should all have the appropriate WIFI devices built in. I personally use a large laptop, but there are so many of them out there that recommending one would be a full-time job. Netbooks are currently pretty simple, stripped-down laptops, and they're really small. I'm probably going to get one soon, as soon as I figure out what exactly I want. That cheap one looks like I might want it.

UPDATE 7/6/12:

I stopped driving a truck for the past couple years, and then over the past few months have been on the road again and found out the free wifi landscape has changed significantly. The biggest change is that McDonald's wifi has become free nationwide, even in California. True, it's almost impossible to connect outside the wals of the restaurant, but the fact that there are so many of them and so many near or in truckstops, or that have truck parking, that it's very easy to get internet access almost any time you want to.

In addition to that, Lowe's also offers free wifi, AND you can park in most of their lots like you can in most Walmart lots (although, good luck with that in California). Most of the time, you can get signal from your truck too.

Because of this, even though I've found a couple more rest areas and truckstops with free wifi, I have decided that I'm not going to update the list any more. I may change my mind in the future, but for now it doesn't look like there's much point to the list or to updating it.
















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Other articles you may find interesting or helpful:
10-4 Good Buddy!
Expose Yourself #1 – Smilin’ Bill
Maps are freakin' awesome

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How to Talk Like a Trucker

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After national talk-like-a-pirate-day became ridiculously popular, it was only natural that national talk-like-a-ninja-day would be commissioned.... except, no one knows how ninjas talk! They're just so dad-gum secretive. So instead, we've commissioned national talk-like-a-trucker-day, which is to be celebrated on October 14th, which coincidentally is the day I got my CDL.

To help you talk like a real trucker, I've gathered together some of the slang and jargon I've heard and used over the years. Read on!

10-4: This one means "Okey dokey". Sometimes it's said as "10-4 good buddy", but usually that's only in the movies. Lately, some people have been abbreviating it to just "10".

Breaker one nine: This one means, "I want to say something and I think I'm on channel 19." Channel 19 is the common channel that most everyone uses, and now and then someone will break in because they have something to say and don't want to be interrupted. Some people abuse this to spam, and need to have their radios confiscated, because spamming the CB is illegal. This phrase is so well known that regular people will use it, even when they're on a different channel than 19, as one of my Coast Guard friends reports.

What's your Twenty: Where are you?

Bear, Smoky, or Smoky Bear: This is a cop. There are actually several different kinds of cops, and each has it's own special term.
   Diesel Weasel: This is a DOT cop, who is out there to mess with truckers and little else. Also referred to as diesel bears.
   Chicken coop: Not a cop, but rather a weigh station, where you tend to have a lot of diesel bears hanging out.
   Full-grown bear: This is a state trooper. Sometimes you hear the term super-trooper used to describe them.
   County Mounty: A county sheriff
   Evel Knievel: Motorcycle cop
   Plain brown wrapper: Unmarked police car. Sometimes they're referred to by their actual color, usually white.
   Kojak with a Kodak: A cop with a radar gun or laser gun, which may or may not be connected to a camera, and he's aimed it at traffic.
   Bear in the air: A police helicopter.

Pickle park: Rest area

Skateboard: flatbed truck

Big truck: a semi-truck. You hear this one a suprising amount of the time, even though 99% of the time when someone's talking about a truck, that's what they're talking about.

The roads themselves have a few terms:
   Get-off: Exit ramp
   Get-on: Entrance ramp
   Hammer lane: Left Lane
   Slow lane: Right Lane
   Granny lane: An extra slow lane provided for getting up hills
   Zipper: the dotted line in the middle of the road

Lot lizard: Prostitute

Four wheeler: Car, pickup, van, motor home. Anything that isn't a truck of some sort.

Yardstick: Mile marker

Gator: Tire tread in the middle of the road

Brake check: Everyone ahead is slowing down, probably for no reason

Granny gear: the lowest gear the truck has

Jake Brake: This is that throaty growling sound you hear when some trucks decelerate, known as an engine brake.

Hammer down/

All right, that's all I've got for now. As I discover more, I'll update this post.

In the meantime, I've linked up a few toy trucks (and a Transformer). I was hoping to find some matchbox trucks or something of that nature like I used to have when I was little, but this was all I could find. Perhaps by the time you click on the link, they'll have one you can find.

Trucks trucks everywhere! Part 1

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“30,000 pounds... of mashed... bananas” - Harry Chapin

Driving a truck isn’t for sissies. Most of you know that intellectually, but few of you appreciate it in your gut. What I’d like to do here is three important things: first, give you an appreciation for what it’s like to be a truck driver; second, help you if you want to be a truck driver; and third, provide a few useful resources to existing truck drivers to help them do their jobs better, safer, and with greater job satisfaction. Plus, the unwritten guarantee that we’ll entertain and educate!

I've got a few articles for you, and today's is about what it's like to BE a truck driver. Read on!

Stupid people are trying to kill you

I can't count the number of times I've had people do their level best to get either me or themselves killed. Sure, you've probably seen a trucker or two doing something crazy, and it sticks out in your mind because there's so few of them, but the overwhelming majority of truckers take their jobs seriously and drive safely. There are thousands of accidents every year, and trucks are in a disproportionately small fraction of them - that is, if trucks represent 25% of the vehicles on the road, significantly less than 25% of accidents involve trucks. But you can be sure they'll make the news! Of top of that, in accidents that do involve a truck and a car, over 90% of the time, it's the car-driver's fault; however, you can be sure the truck driver will be the one to take the blame. He went through a school to learn how to drive, he gets a year's experience driving every month, so obviously it's the fault of the guy who knows what he's doing, and not of the guy who cut him off.

Okay, so let's talk about that headline.

Crappy drivers try to kill you

I've had plenty of people drive crazy around me. I've had people jump in front of me and slam on their brakes in front of me when I was rolling down a hill at 70 mph because they wanted to make an illegal U-turn. (That person was lucky my brakes and experience were better than his!) I've had lots of people cut me off, or nearly hit me, or sit beside me for several miles or any number of other things.

You're driving a 40 ton vehicle, surrounded by 1 and 2 ton vehicles. You've got to be careful, because they get their licenses from a cereal box, and if you get into an accident, it doesn't matter who was really at fault, you're going to take the blame.

Politicians try to kill you

There are lots of restrictions on where you can take a truck, and few of them are made out of any sense of practicality or your living conditions. There are places where you can't idle your truck. Hey, when it's 50 below, I tell you what, governor of New Jersey, I'll trade beds with you. I'll let you sleep in my truck without any generator or heat, while I sleep in your bed with your wife watching your TV using your bathroom and your shower. Or when it's 100 or hotter, you can sleep in that oven and I'll enjoy your air conditioner.

Let's get realistic here. If you really expect to make a dent in pollution (which is what the no-idling laws are supposedly about), do something intelligent for a change. Ticket cars that belch more smoke than any 100 trucks on the highway. Insist trucking companies install an electrical plug that can power the truck's heater, a/c, and accessories, and then install outlets in truck parking spaces. Then we can just plug in and we don't need to run our engines. That would save a lot of diesel too.

The next thing some of them do is tell you that you can only park for a couple hours in a rest area. How idiotic is that? Federal law requires us to stop and sleep for 10 hours. Where are we supposed to do that? These states aren't exactly brimming with truckstops. Wasn't there some rest area funding bill passed recently because some trucker got killed because he couldn't find a proper place to park for the night?

On top of that, some states restrict a truck's speed. I can't think of anything more dangerous or wasteful of resources on the highway than a slow-moving vehicle on the same road with a lot of fast-moving vehicles. The fast vehicles get all clogged up behind the slow vehicles, wasting everyone's time, and what if someone's not paying attention? They're going to ram right into that slower vehicle, and with a huge speed difference, like 15 mph in some cases (California), that means the car driver is going to die. Considering all the attention that gets focused on insignificant dangers, I don't see why this huge one is ignored.

And let's not even mention the lane restrictions. Through 99% of the cities, a given truck is just trying to drive straight through it. Considering the amount of energy required to get one of these things moving, it makes a lot more sense to dedicate the HOV and express lanes to trucks, not to cars. Get those trucks through so they don't waste time clogging up the highways.

Hollywood turns the world against you

Has there ever been a movie with a truck in it that didn't paint the truck as some all-powerful force of nature and use that to scare the crap out of the viewers?

Your company tries to rip you off

And they usually succeed!

There's this myth that truckers make a lot of money, and therefore trucking companies spare no effort to rip you off. Same for the truckstops. But 95% of truckers are just as broke as the rest of us, if not moreso, because considering how long we have to be out there to get our paycheck, we don't even make minimum wage.

But the problem is that most of us are paid by the mile, and in every case, those miles get shorted. It's just the way the companies do business. You get a load that requires you to drive from the north side of Chicago to the south side, you drive 50 miles, but you don't get paid for any of them because both locations are within the city limits of Chicago. That's an extreme example, but it happens.

And then they make you sit for long periods. Most companies claim to pay layover - that is, if you sit for more than 2 days, you get paid, because bill collector's don't accept "my company doesn't feel like paying me for all the time they expect me to be available out there but they won't let me do any real work". So they make you sit for a day and a half, and then they assign you a load that doesn't pick up for a couple days, and then they give you 5 days to make a 2 day drive. You're sitting 7 days and not getting paid for any of it. Now this is a rather extreme example, and it doesn't happen that way very often, but I'm no stranger to sitting 2-3 days per load without getting paid, and then being given a short run.

Your customers are all different

The majority of the places you go to pick up or drop off do things largely the same, but there are plenty of exceptions. What one will insist you do, another will forbid, and a third will cry bloody murder! It's rather silly; I'd think they'd want to improve efficiency rather than attack it, but I guess that's just me.

Kids love you

It's not all bad, of course. I don't think there's a month that goes by where I don't have some kid(s) asking me to toot my horn at them, and I'd say I average about once a week. It's fun!

You get to travel

I like traveling, and so do a lot of other people. In a given month, you're likely to drive as many miles as most people do in a whole year, and I've gotten to see quite a few interesting things in my time. I've also had the good fortune of being able to visit many friends and family members over the course of my driving days that I otherwise would not have gotten to see.

It's a bit isolating

You're away from home several weeks at a time. You drive about 10 hours and do some work for another four, and by the end of the day, you're tired and just want to sleep. Weeks can go by without you noticing. It's hard to have a lot of friends, unless you already made them before you started driving, and if you live someplace like Florida, where you don't get to go very often, then you don't get to see them. I happen to have family and friends scattered all around the country, but if you've got all your eggs in one basket, you'll never see them but once every month or two.

And unless you've got someone to take care of your affairs while you're on the road, you're going to get behind on your bills too.

There is variety

There are different types of driving jobs. There are local drivers who are home every night. It's not much different than any other job, except you drive a truck.

There are regional drivers, who stay within a few states and are home on the weekends.

And then there are the OTR drivers, who drive all over the country and only get home once every month or two. This one is the roughest on your social life, but it also gives you the best opportunity to see things you've never seen before.

Overall
Okay, so let's break it down. On the bad side, there are stupid people trying to kill you or otherwise make your job harder and more obnoxious than it has to be. It can be a real downer if you focus on it. However, you get a lot of interesting opportunities. You see things you've never seen, wake up to different scenery outside your window every morning, and if you're big on chatting, you encounter thousands of people each year. My first year driving a truck, I saw a dozen family members I hadn't seen since I was little, made a few dozen new friends, saw a few old friends from the Navy, and saw a lot of places few other people get to see. I discovered an awesome chain of Mongolian barbecue restaurants, took pictures of a couple hundred cities in 40 states, explored several towns and cities, and discovered all kinds of interesting tourist spots I can come back to in later years when I have a car.

It's rough some times, but ultimately I feel like I got paid to take a long vacation.

Next time: Next time I'll talk about how to get your start as a trucker, and later, I'll provide some trucker resources, including a list of free wifi locations you can make use of.

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Where I've been

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"I'm just a-wandering on the face of the Earth" - the Moody Blues

I've been a lot of places, and I'm NOT an army brat to justify it. Even before I had a driver's license, I'd been to 11 states, and been in international waters (which is outside any country). I'm constantly amazed at all the cool places I've been, things I've done, stuff I've seen, and people I've met, and in the coming months, I'll be sharing some of what I've discovered with you.

In the meantime, I'm going to show you on the map where I've been, and as my travels expand, I'll be updating these maps, so check back here once in a while.

My travels have come in four broad phases: before I got a driver's license, after I got it but before I joined the Navy, after I started driving a truck, and the fourth phase will be after I stop driving a truck, a point in time that is rapidly approaching.

Being in the Navy did wonders for allowing me to travel the world. I was a bit hesitant to go on my Med Cruise in 1999-2000, but fortunately nothing bad happened to us. God must've been watching over us, because it was very quiet over there for the coming of the new millennium. I got to do a few things that are generally not possible, or dangerous to do, because it had quieted down for a little while.

Being a truck driver has likewise expanded my travels throughout this great country of ours. Before then, most of my travels were between Indiana, Florida, and Mississippi, with occasional detours to go see something interesting. Since then, though, I've been throughout most of the states I've been in, to most of the major cities, and I've traveled along around 80% of the interstate system, with a considerable number of states in which I've driven every mile of interstate they have.

In the future, I intend to visit every state, territory, and national park in the Union, every continent (though I don't like the cold, so my visit to Antarctica will be short), and possibly every country, though as there are a lot of disputed areas and new countries, some of them will have to settle down and play nice before I'll grace them with my presence. I also plan to sail every sea and ocean.

Enjoy the maps, and enjoy the journey!

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