cooking times.

I got a good laugh when I first read it and you said your foot taste good,lol.

 

I usually just use a crock pot. I have thought it would be cool to build a little manifold where you could hook your coolant line to one end of it and out the other to where you stick a can or something in there and your 180-210 coolant is flowing around it through the manifold. I guess just coiling some copper tubing would do it, but I was thinking more welding a box inside a box with a stub pipe on both sides and a little door.

 

I am old school, true...but it's not even about being old school, it's being prepared. I do oversized loads as you know. I also roam ALL of North America. When I can, I will eat dinner in a truckstop or a restaurant and stay in a motel. But sometimes there aren't any truckstops, restaurants, convenience stores, cities, towns, civilization or anything. I carry my black lunchbox, a microwave, one of those little gas stove hotplate thing, a barbecue grill and a bag of charcoal, fishing pole, golf driver with golfballs, lawn chair and a little folding table.

I've been in windfarms when the weather has gotten ugly. You're stuck. Or a jobsite shuts down for a holiday after you get there. You're there for 5 days. Or up in Canada or the NWT trying to get to a jobsite that's hundreds of miles up a dirt road. Or even worse, stuck out in open range territory in the southwestern USA where its hot and dusty and full of poisonous creatures.

When you're stuck out on a job for days, if there are other drivers, they will have food too. Weather permitting, you grab your lawn chairs and sit out, cook food and share food. If the pilot cars stay with you, everyone jumps in the pilot's pickup and go fishing. Talk about good times! Getting paid to go fishing? Get stuck in Arizona under an oversize over the weekend? Go golfing. There's almost always a course nearby. Cant golf? Carry a bucket of balls and a driver and crack them out into the desert! Work hard, play hard.

Yeah, I hear drivers crying and bellyaching about how horrible trucking is, it's what you make it. Even if you get stuck at a truckstop for the weekend...there's always one other driver who will throw in with you, bobtail out to get some groceries, fire up the grills and have a few adult beverages. I'd rather sit in the back of a truckstop with a couple drivers with the grill going, instead of being inside the TV room at a truckstop. If it's hot, wait until the sun starts to set. See a couple flatbeds parked together on the back row Saturday afternoon? Sounds like a party!

Got stuck in Laredo one weekend. Another driver and I went to the local HEB for some groceries. They had this 'ready for the grill' seasoned chicken and ribs at the meat dept. Grabbed a tub of potato salad and a giant can of baked beans. He had a stepdeck and I had a lowboy. Anybody that wanted any food came by. Food is on the stepdeck, everyone sat on the lowboy.

It's the whole lemon into lemonade thing.

Speaking of lemonade...the funniest thing I've ever seen was at the Hook in Baytown. Bunch of drivers at the back row are eating and drinking, having a good time, when this driver whose trailer we were cooking on went into his cab and brought out what looked like a piss jug. It was half full. He sniffed it and then drank from it. Everyone was quiet and watching him. "What the heck?" He turned around and noticed everyone staring in silence. He said, "It's apple cider."

 

excuses excuses,lol

 

I'm going to have a good time wherever I go. There ARE some times when I don't want to be bothered with anyone or anything. I will check into a motel room and order a pizza and hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. When I get tired of trucking, I get out of the truck. When I get mean and thinking of killing the next person I see, I get out of the truck.

But dude, I think you're doing pretty well. You drive old iron like I do. Its your truck, it performs the way you want it. It doesn't look like it was pressed out of a cookie cutter. It says LARGECAR. You're doing better than 95% of the people on the planet. It's like comparing a Z06 to a Prius. I don't care how much better economy a Prius gets, I would rather have the Vette. No one ever gets wood looking at a Prius.

 

$25 electric skillet from walmart is the handiest thing I've found, it fries, boils, steams, bakes, whatever you want it to do. BBQ's are more fun though for sure. Only time I eat in a truckstop anymore is when I'm rolling with another driver.