Is going to the northeast mandatory for an OTR driver?

What's worse than driving the Northeast as a solo driver?

Being one half of a trainee/trainee team and doing it!
We had a load from Kansas that dropped in carteret,NJ and Providence, RI. Bother appointments within 3 hrs of each other! I am with whoever said just drive it get the experience and keep trucking. Sure the turns are sharp and very narrow at some points, morons in 4the wheelers are in every state and tolls are out the roof.
I drove 95%my of our miles there and can say I did it! No incidents.
My nerves were a little fried but nothing anyone should be skeert of. I think in the long run it will make me a better "Freight Relocation Specialist "...got freight ready to go!!!

 

By the way ...that was only our second load!!

 

now that's funny....................

 

Only thing that bugs me about the NE is the parking situation, other than that bring it on. Of course I'm from Chicago so traffic is nothing new to me and within 10 minutes of learning to shift a big truck I was stuck in the mess that 80/94 going to IL from IN becomes around 8:30am. If I want a real challenge I'll haul a 45k load of Kingsford charcoal out of WV, down the US hwy to I68 in MD. First time I did that was a real experience but made me a way better driver in just a couple hours.

 

I hated the NE at first. Now that I've been there a lot I don't mind it so much. You get to know where to park. I just hate some of the routes to get around tolls. Last time I was in Jersey they had me going on some stupid "highways". The intersection I was looking for turned out to be one of those "ramps" with cars parked along it. It looked like it was going into a residential neighborhood. I re-routed myself at that point.

 

I knew one person when told go around the jughandle kept driving looking for a bar named the jughandle

 

No ya don't
One of the mistaken assumption is that you have to do things like go to school get the license sign on with mega corp trucking go OTR etc to get started well its BS as well as the fallacy that OTR is were the $$$ is
Been to this for 20 yrs never went to "school" and if I totaled it up maybe 9 months in the bunk over the 20

 

And maybe 20 years ago you didn't have to.

None OTR jobs for complete newbies are very location specific.

 

well mandatory school is coming but still no need to be OTR I for one used to hire students
Also not saying that going the other way is "wrong" just saying there are many ways to skin a cat that a lot of newbies don't consider and you can be a professional driver and never spend a night in a truck if that is a priority and I can not think of any normal local this isn't possible at some level

It used to be kind of a joke with Greyhound drivers to give a ticket back to the newbies that where going to SLC for England as we new that 75% where going to be back on a bus headed home in the not to distant future
disgusted by there whole adventure and it doesn't have to be that way

 

When I was a Navy recruiter I actually had a Greyhound driver do something like that to an applicant that was going to boot camp; the recruit handed the driver the ticket, the driver looked him up and down, chuckled, handed the ticket back to the recruit and said, "Please, don't waste the tax payers money... The driver had been in the Marines and wanted to start the new sailor off with a little ribbing. The recruit looked dumbfounded.