Celadon Stoires: The Adventures Of Dale And Jerry.

Just to give an update, I landed at the airport at 4:15pm and was in my hotel room at the Quality inn by 5:30pm. Room has two queen beds, a 32 inch tv, free wifi, a mini fridge, and a microwave. They offer three shuttle times in the morning of 6:30am, 7:00am and 7:30am and 5:15pm, 5:45pm and 6:30pm in the evening. I went straight to my room to unpack and have not talked to any other students. There is a bob evens in the front parking lot of the hotel and gas stations a block away. I ordered papa johns for dinner. Jerry will be here tomorrow night at 9:45pm. It does appear there are over 80 students here as most of the shuttle pages where full, but its hard to tell as a few have been whited out. They do have breakfast here on the from 6-9 during the week and 7-10am on the weekends.

The school only runs monday till friday so no class till monday morning, I will use this time to work on the high road, watch the redsox and football and make sure I can order anything i forgot from amazon.

Very cool! Let us know how things go. You can be sure that about half of your class will be on their way home within a few days. Probably 20% of them won't make it through the physical, drug screen, and background check alone.

Day 1- I was on the final shuttle to Celadon today and arrived to school right at 8am. The instructor came into the cafe around 8:05 and had us follow him, if you already had a CDL you went into one room if not you went to a classroom with Max the instructor. We started going over the CDL book from the beginning. There were close to 30 new students and about 12 that started last week that couldn't pass the test required for their permits, about half those have till friday to pass their permits or will be "given a ticket home". After lunch Steve Russell the OWNER of Celadon came and talked to us, he was funny and then let us ask him anything. I wanted his feelings on O/O, know that I don't want to do it, to my surprise he said he didn't recommend it and if you did do it he said to wait at lease 5 years. He then asked Max the instructor his thoughts and he agreed. That was a good sign for me. The rest of the day was spent working on general knowledge, there are a few in class that don't know how to stop talking. I have my permits so its all review for me but can't hurt none. Day two will be finishing all the permit info as well as tankers, double/triples and HM.

Now I want to clarify some info about this school. While some people have been here over 8 weeks its because they aren't picking up the info on the range. There was a women that came in with zero trucking knowledge and passed everything from A-Z in 8 days. I will be on pace to finish in three weeks. I would rate today 9/10

Now I want to clarify some info about this school. While some people have been here over 8 weeks its because they aren't picking up the info on the range. There was a women that came in with zero trucking knowledge and passed everything from A-Z in 8 days. I will be on pace to finish in three weeks. I would rate today 9/10

That's great to hear. I know one guy in another thread had "heard rumors" that people were all stuck there for months at a time and all kinds of stuff. Turns out the fact that they're still there and haven't been sent home shows Celadon must be pretty committed to helping people out. Because most of the Company-Sponsored Training Programs will send anyone home if they're struggling to keep up.

We weren't told for sure, but there was an accident involving nearly ten cars out at the entrance to the road coming back here to celadon so most of us suspect that our instructor was involved along with several other celadon employees. We literally just missed it because it happened during the time our van dropped us off this morning.

That said, we are all sitting here and some are studying, I'm quizzing on the high road program just making sure I can answer the questions right for the permit tomorrow, and we've got our slackers like normal. Kinda sucks for most of the ones who haven't even seen the high road program but I'm confident that even if this instructor doesn't show today that I can pass what I need. Too bad the law requires this classroom time, lol.

Oh man....serious bummer about the wreck! That's no way to start a day. Hope they're ok.

And trust me - you're not going to have any problems whatsoever passing that permit exam. You'll fly through it like it's nothing. You've done an awesome job with the High Road Training Program so you definitely know your stuff. Don't sweat it one bit.

Day 2- So as Jerry already said our instructor didn't show up at all to day, thankfully it was not because he was in the accident, he just had car trouble. So I had my laptop and after lunch I talked to the School director Scott and asked if I could use the over head projector to help the class study. To my surprise he said yes, So me and another student (OTR driver from ten years ago) used cristcdl.com to help the class study. I thought it would be hectic with 35 students but they mostly paid attention and really paid attention. At the end of the day my recruiter stopped me and gave me a adda-boy, it felt good. I took to heart the advice that everything you do in class is part of the job interview, but several higher ups noticed what I did and I noticed that they noticed. The day also consisted of physicals and drug test, nobody was sent home today but the drug test won't be back for a few days. Talking to a few guys and gals there will be some that fail, yet they seem to think they tricked the system.

Day 3 will is the BMV all I have left is HM and double triples. The company does require all of them.

Thanks, Brett.

I have a couple questions that I've come up with after today's day "in class". Most of the day I spent doing practice tests and trying to un-halt myself on the logbook questions lol. I also spent a considerable part of the day checking out other practice tests from the following sites:

cristcdl.com *site-that-must-not-be-named* (was horrible. Who codes a quiz in flash with no support for Android phones that dont have Flash anymore?) cb39.org truckercountry.com

And I am noticing discrepancies. First off, I'd love to point out that truckercountry and cristcdl both have the exact same questions, written the exact same way word for word. One of them appears to have copied from the other. I can understand that. However, truckercountry gives you WRONG ANSWERS! I checked one set of questions, verified with my roommate Dale as well as the CDL manual, and truckercountry gives completely wrong answers on the test I checked out.

The sad part about this is that Celadon references truckercountry as a "good site" to do practice tests. I'll be talking with our Instructor tomorrow to get that fixed up.

Also, I have noticed that cristcdl may be giving the wrong answers as well. For example, If a truck has 1/4 of its leafsprings broken or missing, according to the High Road program I just took, that truck is still legal to drive. cristcdl says it's not.

I have to go take my general knowledge test in the AM and am wondering how current TT's content in the High Road program truly is. If I answer "true" to "a truck is still legally operable when up to 1/4 of its leaf springs are broken or missing", can I depend on that answer being true? I used the High Road as my primary study guide, and I suppose I'll let yall know tomorrow if I passed my general knowledge!

@Aces-N-eights (Dale) - great job helping the class! Too bad you didn't think to use TruckingTruth. Our system is 1000 times better than cristcdl. For instance, check this out:

CDL Practice Questions

There's over 700 questions there complete with answers, a scoring system, a snippet of information straight out of the CDL manual containing the answer, and even advice from experienced drivers pertaining to most of the questions. Nobody has anything that compares.

And as far as compatibility goes, not only is our system compatible with various devices, but we have that same set of questions and answers in our CDL Test Question Android App, which is free.

I have to go take my general knowledge test in the AM and am wondering how current TT's content in the High Road program truly is. If I answer "true" to "a truck is still legally operable when up to 1/4 of its leaf springs are broken or missing", can I depend on that answer being true? I used the High Road as my primary study guide, and I suppose I'll let yall know tomorrow if I passed my general knowledge!

Jerry, our High Road Training Program is literally the CDL manual converted to web pages with questions we created ourselves from the manual. So our program is accurate. Now the actual manual used was the 2012 Illinois CDL manual. We went through and compared it with other state manuals and 99% of the content is identical, word for word. Anything noteworthy we found that was different in other states we noted it in the program. But we found the differences to be insignificant.

So our program is as accurate as the CDL manual itself because it is the CDL manual itself. So you can be confident our program is fantastic.

I sat here all morning in class using the review questions here to make sure I can pass my endorsements etc. I'm pretty confident I'll pass the tests I'm going for today, but only time will tell. We are waiting on transportation right now, I'll update later.