New to the forum...seeking advice and encouragement.

Hubby and I are 2 weeks into trucking school. We're planning on being team drivers and looking forward to the lifestyle. We've always wanted to work together and this will be our chance. He's coming from the flailing construction industry & I'm coming from a boring, state job as a health inspector . We've been married for 21 yrs and we still enjoy each other's company. Our son is 19 yrs old, working and living on his own, so we figured it was a good time to start chasing our dream.

Last week we started driving on the range. Neither of us has ever driven a big truck before & we seem to be the only one's in class who haven't. We're struggling. Between Tues, Wed, and Thurs...they had us learning how to float the gears (only between 2nd and 4th), start on a hill, and all the backing maneuvers we could encounter on the test (straight back, offset backing, blindside parallel park, drivers side parallel park, and alley dock). It was quite overwhelming for both of us but I guess they show you how to do all of it so you can spend the next 6-8 wks perfecting it. We're doing this at night after our day jobs, we're tired and it's dark. We go to bed talking about where we think we're going wrong on the backing and wake up talking about it...lol! Any helpful advice or tips on backing will be greatly appreciated .

 

Thanks for the words of encouragement. We spent the weekend with a 10' trailer hooked up to our pickup practicing backing with only our mirrors between placed 5 gallon buckets. I think our main struggle is flipping our brains on the whole backing thing. We've both grown up backing boat trailers, etc but we both turned to watch the trailer...did not use the mirrors. So it's hard to retrain your hands to automatically move the right way. I'm looking forward to Tues nite's class so I can practice what we've learned on the big rigs. We'll get this!