Finished My Training With CRST

I am sitting in a motel room in Cedar Rapids. My future co driver is still on the road with his trainer. Since this is Easter weekend, I doubt I will even find out very much until Monday. Since CRST is an expediting team set up, over the course of my training we have been moving more and more to keeping the truck rolling all the time. This last 70 hours, we did that, starting in Toledo Ohio, shooting down to Lorado Texas on the border, back to Louisville Kentucky, then out to Seattle Washington, then back to Minneapolis Minnesota, and now down to Cedar Rapids this afternoon. I'm too tired to count it all up tonight, but I know we did more than 6000 miles. We did stop a few times for 5 hour breaks in the early part, but once we headed to Seattle it was a tight deadline and kept moving except fr fuel and bathroom breaks. We got back to Mn with 1 hour to spare on our deadline. We were 6 hours early getting into Seattle though, but they gave us the load back pretty quick and we were off.

My training was pretty much incident free except for dealing with a truck in the shop for a week. And that did not fix it. It has a coolant leak, and actually was worse after being in the shop.A gallon a day. But CRST did not want to take it off the road again, because freight was heavy for the end of the month.

I almost goofed big at the end. Last night, the last turn to drop the load, I was at over 10 hours on my clock, and exhausted. I took a right turn too close, and there was a sign on the curb. I was going slow though, and my trainer was up, and in the passenger seat. He stopped me before I hit it. I had to back up, and ended up blocking the road for a minute. It was 4 AM though, and no traffic. Other than that, my only screw up, was one night after driving through a snow storm, I missed an exit and went 40 miles too far. That one I laughed about. Almost hitting the sign, I didn't. I am fortunate I was able to save it. And grateful that my trainer was there.

Hey congrats on finishing up training! That's awesome!

We're coming into the summer months here soon and you should be getting really good miles overall for the next 6+ months so that's great! Hopefully you'll have a pretty decent co-driver.

Congratulations Troubador! That's an awesome update - I seem to remember saying something to you about the fact that they would be really running you guys hard - it looks like they have, but that's a great way to learn the business. I wish you every success with your partner when y'all get assigned your own truck. We'd love to hear from you every now and then.