Getting Lost

Life on the road as a truck driver can be a roller coaster. Some days everything runs smooth and perfect. Then there are days everything seems to go wrong. You never know what to expect. Putting up with traffic on a daily basis is enough to tear any professional driver’s nerves apart. Add bad weather to the equation with a bad set of directions. What you have is a recipe for disaster with severe consequences for that driver.
It was December 2006. I just dropped five connexes for the 101st Airborne Division who returned home to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When my qualcomm beeped for me to pick up my next load. My instruction was to drive up to a small town called Elizabethton, Tennessee to pick up a preloaded trailer. So I look at my map and thought. This should be fun crossing over the Smokey Mountains on back roads driving a big truck. Now I have driven over the mountains before but not on back state roads like this. This small two lane state highway had more curves then every letter in the alphabet glued together. The curves were so sharp; an eighteen wheeler was actually to long for it without being in both lanes. Most of the time I had to drive less then half the speed limit to make it safe. The beautiful scenery was worth every minute driving slowly across the Smokey Mountains.
I make it to Elizabethton, Tennessee for my preloaded trailer. All I have to do is drop my empty trailer, grab my paperwork, and get my loaded trailer chained up. My destination is a small farm town called Thompson Ridge in lower New York State.
I started driving to this small farming community listening to the weather on XM radio. All I could hear is snow, snow, and more snow in the northeast. Oh Yippee as I’m thinking to myself. I am driving to an unknown territory with winter conditions pulling a flatbed full of heavy prefab steel girders. The scheduled delivery is for 7:00 am the day after tomorrow. So if I hit bad weather conditions. I still have a full day ahead of me to drive and get two ten hour breaks in before delivery. After a long day of driving, making my delivery and pick up. I stopped in Glade Springs, Virginia for the night to get my first break.
The next morning, I start early to make 325 miles through the beautiful rolling hills of Virginia on I-81. I need to make it through Maryland before the evening traffic. For a small state, they sure do have a lot of cars in Maryland. I make it all the way to Maybrook, New York. This is about 30 miles from my drop. Without going to far out of my way, that was the closet truck stop.
The next morning I get up at 5:00 am and do my pretrip. The weather man was calling for rain or a mixture with sleet. It happened to be heavy fog. Now driving on ice scares me but fog is just as bad. Driving forty tons down small country road is the worse and not being able to see maybe 10-20 feet in front of you is not a good feeling. Here I am trying to find a small town where I’m suppose to turn left according to the directions I have been given. I am slowly driving along looking for this small town. I see the sign and before I know it, I‘m in the next town. Now I am thinking maybe I got bad directions or missed something. It has happened to me before. I see a hardware store up ahead with a decent size parking lot. I pull in there and apply my brakes. I call the place where I’m delivering too on my cell phone.
An older gentleman answers the phone. I tell him who I am and where I’m at. He tells me, you have gone too far down this road. You need to turn around and come back to turn right at this road. By this time, it started drizzling outside mixed with the fog. The school buses and morning traffic started moving. I explained to him, this is not a small truck or a small load. I asked him to meet me at this road that I needed to turn right. He agreed but also said the town is not really a town but unincorporated town. With the fog in front of me, I did not care at this point. I just wanted to get this load delivered safely. So I start heading back the way I came and in the distance. I could see a pickup truck flashing his lights at me. Sure enough, here was that elusive road I was supposed to turn on. I turned right and followed the pickup to a farm.
Despite the heavy fog and light rain this morning. I make it safely and on time to my final destination. The muscles in my body begin to relax and my nerves settle down. Once again, I had proven to myself. As a professional driver, I can drive anywhere in any conditions with the right skills. You should always maintain a calm attitude in any driving situation.

I'm taking Composition I this semster and this is the first of five essay's I have to write. The first paragraph is my thesis for the essay. The story I wrote here is true and I tried to be descriptive. I'm no Ernest Hemingway and don't plan on it either. Please feel free to comment on my writing. Please don't be mean in your comments either but give me useful feedback to improve my writing. Constructive criticism is what I'm looking for.