What an awesome drive! – 1036hrs

Well, the instructor drove for a few hours this morning and got us about half-way here. I took over around lunch-time and finished up the last couple hundred miles. Still grinding some gears… BUT there WAS a definite improvement over the last couple of days. We drove through this wicked nice, winding, highway (I75 through Tennessee) that was simply awesome!
It was a slow, four-lane highway with the speed limit at 55 and 50 for trucks. It was truly a beautiful ride through the very hilly Tennessee wilderness with a few very sharp turns (40 for trucks at times) and down through the valley’s we would go and then back up and around and over and twice THROUGH…

Made for a very pleasant day of driving! So we arrived in Gaffney, SC and dropped our pizza trailer and picked up an empty and headed up to the local Pilot truck-stop a couple of miles away where we’re bedding down for the night!

I even managed to get to talk to my sweetie for a while tonight via chat so it was one pretty great day! Right now we don’t have a load scheduled for tomorrow so we’re just puttering around here. I shuffled my bunk around some trying to make some more room… again, one person can live in these trucks without much of a problem, but two grown men make for some cramped quarters! Oh well, soon enough I’ll have my own truck and can have all the room to myself! 🙂

I’m hoping we can get a load headed out west somewhere (if not the Northeast, but I know my instructor doesn’t like to run up there much)… but with Ike just having passed through…there’s not much freight to be had through the mid-south so we may end up heading north again!

Oh, one last thing… my instructor had me doing more 90 degree backing practice tonight both at the receiver (called our 90) and here at the truck-stop. Both times I did a “passing” job at putting it in the hole from a 90 degree approach. That maneuver is one that I’ll be tested on to get my CDL so I’m pretty happy that I’m able to do it… not to mention pretty damn impressed I’m ABLE to get this monster swung around in such a tight corner!