About To Start Training With Roehl

Due to the time that I returned to the terminal on Friday, not everything that needed to be done was completed. Since everything that remained to do could be done over the phone, through the Tenstreet Portal, or through e-mail, I was sent home to take care of the rest.

Spoke with my Fleet Training Manager and filled out the remaining forms this morning. Now I'm on call from 7am to 5pm daily until Safety clears me to drive and I get assigned to a trainer.

At this point (well, starting last Friday), I need to maintain a legal paper log until I get start running electronic logs. This is easy because it's just the one day of duty last Friday and one page of nothing but Off Duty with the dates that 24 hours of Off Duty time applies to.

Hopefully the process of getting assigned to a trainer won't take long.

Still waiting on a trainer. I did receive an e-mail from my Fleet Training Manager this morning stating that Safety has cleared me to drive and I'm on the list for a trainer.

I'm all packed and ready to go whenever the call comes in for me to go meet with my trainer.

Got the call this morning to get up and go. I'm now on the road on my way to the northeast to meet my trainer (stopped at a rest area, so I'm not posting while driving).

Congratulations!! And Thanks for the update, and please keep us updated on your journey with Roehl.

Met my trainer Friday outside of Philadelphia and are about to wrap up the 1st load of the week tomorrow in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to drive due to me not having the proper endorsement for the load. The upside is that my first experience with New York City was from the passenger seat of the truck.

I should start driving tomorrow after we drop the load. We already have a pre-plan for our next load. From the details we have on it, I'll be able to drive.

I was finally able to drive. Made my first run from north of Green Bay, WI to the Springfield Undeground in Missouri. That's an interesting place to deliver to. Junior Honduras on YouTube has a good video of it for anyone reading this that's never been there and wants to see what it's like.

Overall I'm doing well with my driving and adjusting well to life on the road. I still have a lot to work on, but this was only my first load and a heavy one at that (grossed 78k).

I'm settling in to a point where driving on the interstate and in general is more comfortable, but I still have some situations where I get pretty nervous.

I still have a lot to work on with it, but I'm doing OK with my backing. It really is fairly different than in school.

The paperwork and communication side of the job is pretty easy, and I'm getting it down pretty quick.

So far I'm enjoying it and am still excited about it. It's kinda funny, you hear a lot of drivers complain about reefers and parking next to them, or even with one themselves (which I do not blame them or fault them for, they are noisy), but I had the best night of sleep I've had in a long time last night when our reefer was running. Don't know if it was the "white noise" (I always sleep better with white noise) of having the reefer running, or if I was just that tired. I've still got at least a couple more days of running reefer, so I should be able to figure that out in that time. If it's the noise of the reefer that helps me sleep, I may check into switching to the reefer division (I'm set to be in the dry van division, but I was placed with a reefer trainer).

I run a lot of reefers for Walmart. Many times I'll get a vendor backhaul and I'll shutdown at a store or Cabelas for my 10 hour break... When a reefer cycles into defrost, sometimes it will shutdown and then restart. That's what wakes me up...

Went back to the caves to pick up our load out Wenesday morning. We made it a bit down the road, going through the storms in St. Louis and stopped in Indiana for the night.

About the time we crossed the Ohio state line this morning (Thursday), my Fleet Training Manager called my trainer telling him that he was likely going to be dropping me off somewhere soon so I can get to my next trainer (the trainer I was with for the last week is on the 7/7 fleet and is heading towards home).

I got off the truck in Dayton, OH, and now I sit at the Gary, IN terminal waiting on further instructions on meeting up with my new trainer (there's dorms, laundry facilities, and showers here).

Despite losing the first 3 days to a HAZMAT load and getting off yhe truck a day and a half early, I still managed to clock nearly 1k miles, 2 live loads, and 1 live unload.

Got a call this morning to head to Madison, WI to meet up with my next trainer. However, when I was about an hour away, I got another call saying that that trainer fell through. I was still on the road at the time of the call, so I pulled off to wait for further instructions. A bit later, I got a call telling me to head to the Appleton, WI terminal for the weekend to meet my next trainer on Monday. I've already received a call from him and he'll be letting me know our departure time for Monday. Until then, I'll be hanging out at the Appleton terminal. At least I'll have a fresh 70 when I go on duty then.

Wow, I'm really getting bad about posting updates.

I've been with my trainer now for a bit over a week. He runs on a hybrid local/regional fleet (typical run is about 160 miles, max of about 300 one way, out for 5-5.5 days and home 1.5-2 days, lots of relay work, 2-3 loads a day).

When he goes home for the weekend, I get a bunk room at the Appleton terminal. There's free laundry and shower facilities at the terminal , as well as a courtesy car that I can take into town for an hour if I need to. Not a bad place to spend the weekend. This past weekend, I ran into 2 other students I went to CDL school with. Had a good time hanging out and catching up with them.

The pace is VERY fast. I struggled horribly with the pace last week, plus the struggle of transitioning back to a manual transmission after having driven an automatic for a week. I start keeping up more and more each day, and I'm doing more and more of the work each day.

We're now trying to get my "supervised solo" runs in. If all goes well this week, I should be testing out to get assigned my own truck sometime next week.