What has been your worst experience on the road?

Blizzard of 93. Was rolling north on 59/20. Caught rain in MeridianMS. It was snowing in CubaAL. Rolling north through Bama, the southbounders tell me that the bigroad is shut down at the 459loop. Get to Tuscaloosa and traffic is stopped. (that's a 40 mile backup.) I exit off, grab a motel, hit the ATMs and grab as much cash as I could.

Ended up sharing a pair of rooms with another driver, a highway patrol, a drug dealer and 3 working girls. HP couldn't get home, but had to go to work. The driver, myself and the girls took turns working shifts at the Huddle House down the street for 'free' food because their people couldn't make it in. It was a serious good time.

2011, I was on my way from Granite FallsMN to Corpus. The weather went to hell in Joplin. They shut the roads down and me being oversized couldn't run. I parked at the Fishhook and topped my tanks off. Temps hit -16, and I got stuck there for nearly a week. No one will tell you this, and so I made sure to tell everyone who would listen: If they shut the road down because of weather, that fuel stop that you are at is going to run out of fuel in 4 hours. Lot's of drivers ended up sleeping on the floor in the driver's lounge to stay alive. So that's why I always admonish drivers to not allow their fuel tanks to go below 1/2 tank in the winter OR topping off the fuel tanks as soon as you start hearing about road closures due to weather.

 

This was by far my worst.. hazmat tanker product foamed up if ran at anything over 15 psi.. hoses had to be cleaned out after every product. Had to run 100 and clean 100 feet of foamy hoses 2x. I didn’t get done til about 6 in the morning and soon as I did was told nobody told me I could park there and that I was just a trucker it was above my head despite 90 percent of the previous shift knowing I was planned to stay there. Never again doing anything in chicago

 

I stepped in human poop at receivers while opening my trl doors and talking to the person to the left of me while they were opening their doors. Oh! and I only had one pair of shoes.

 

It doesn't really count as something happening to me. It was just kind of a low point.

I couldn't get my tandems to slide because the trailer I was picking up was so rusted and terrible, and after about 20 minutes of doing everything I knew to do, I looked up and realized that I was in Dover, Delaware, over a thousand miles away from my home, going through a divorce, away from my family... And simply did not know what the #### I was doing with my life.

It was intense. I angrily wiped away a few tears, and stopped myself from literally laying on the ground and sobbing.

That was probably my first moment of clarity that I no longer needed to be on the road. Lol

 

Bad hail storm size of soft balls, western Nebraska on 80. Wind, hail lightning, got dark as night. I’m against stopping in bad weather or adverse conditions in fear of someone running into me, I had to pull onto shoulder I couldn’t see a thing literally, cars were scattered on the interstate busted all there glass out. I had my family with me, I started to panic a bit just angry at myself for putting my 1 year old and 3 year old in that posistion. I was just waiting for a tornado to come thru, luckily that didn’t happen. A cracked windshield and some dents, my family safe and sound thankfully. It was scary though. Then we hit white out conditions in WY the next day, this was in June lol.

 

Hands down my absolute worse experience on this job was in Ohio. I had a glass shard to cut my left eye. I was in the hospital for a bit over 24 hours and out of work for much longer. Some idiot tossed a glass bottle at another driver out of "road rage" and I got the worse end of it. As luck would have it I had my window down. To this day I consider ANYBODY that tosses stuff out of their vehicle like that to be lower than "crotch rot".

 

Wow I don’t think anyone can beat this one. That’s definitely something terrible to go through, especially at that age. May i ask what state you guys were hauling in?

 

Oregon.

 

So what happened next? Lol

 

took me like 2 days to get her to find another driver with a cb