Beginning to get desperate, could use help/advice.

99F here in Las Vegas. Low humidity, so the heat is ok. Better than my home state of Tennessee.

 

A light jacket in the winter.

 

You are WAY ahead of every other newbie. I think the FMCSA ended "just borrow a truck and get a friend to show you how to pass the test" this year. Entry Level Driver Training requirement went into effect Feb of this year. Entry-Level Driver Training (ELDT) | FMCSA
There will be a good trucking company you can work for in Maine. The most likely problem is you won't get home often enough for you or your family to be very happy. You will likely have a choice of a few companies. If you decide under no circumstance will you move from Maine, then pick the trucking company choice with the most business in the region. If you are leaving Maine as soon as you have the funds, and your family agrees, then pick the choice with the most different types of trucking in whatever region they are strong in. MY opinion is that starting Over The Road (OTR) trucking is lighting a fuse on the divorce bomb, if you have a partner not in trucking. Do OTR just long enough to switch into some other trucking like LTL, or home weekly or home daily. MOST newbies greatly underestimate the trouble of not being home often. I was single when I started OTR and after one year I went back to my old job I hated because I was worn out mentally. I made more than twice the money I made at my old "I hate it" job, but the money didn't help with the pointless rat-race feature of trucking in my mind. One year later I was back OTR with my dog, and that made a huge difference. Back then staying connected to people was much much harder. Cell phones were not commonly used, no internet or texting, no GPS, no satellite radio, etc.

 

Please don't let your desperation, if that's what you are feeling, lead you to rush into a bad choice. From the preparations you are telling me about, you probably aren't going to do that. But the difference between the right company for you and the first company to get you on a bus or airliner to orientation could be pretty big. The goal is one full year at one employer with no tickets, no accidents, etc. IN one year of OTR you will learn the really important features of trucking that make it much better for you and your family, so I wouldn't expect to be picking a company you can one day retire. 80-90% of newbies leave the industry before one year of experience. I think most of that is due to newbies flipping a coin to choose which company and because companies that hire the most newbies are using them like a rented mule because they will be leaving soon. After one full year with no tickets, no accidents you can work for a lot more companies. Stay at your first company until you think you have found your "forever home". The goal is to work for as few companies as possible. The VERY BEST companies do not want job hoppers, which they define as 1 job per year or more than 3 companies in 5 years.

You can check some details of trucking companies in the Feds SAFER WEB system. Just enter the company name or the DOT/MC number and you can see how many trucks they have and their relative score for safety violations, Out Of Service, and HazMat violations. You want them to have scores below national average, the lower the better.

When researching companies, make the recruiter give your phone or email to one of their drivers and speak to him about the actual pay and working conditions (frequency of home time, length of home time, weekly pay, condition of trucks/trailers, hassles form customers, etc.). The recruiter is a car salesman. they get paid to sell the company, not to make you happy. If you want to know the real amount of weekly pay, as the driver doing OTR at that company. Also, ask him if that amount if his best week or what he made last week. It's okay to ask about pay, don't be shy.

 

Doesn't take long to run 30K miles in a truck.