Worth it to get back into trucking?

Beautiful state. Not so crazy about its traffic though. Would be nice to drive South Dakota or somewhere desolate like that.

 

I saved up a decent amount of money in a short time via OTR trucking. I don't think I would've saved anything close to the $2K I was netting every month if I had worked a regular job instead with whatever I could've found with my bachelor of arts degree in hand. Of course, I was able to do this by making the sacrifice to live on the road and not rent an apartment or own a car. To me, it often sucked to end up getting my "free time" in some random place like West Memphis. Of course that's the trade off, but personally I didn't think it was worth it to rent an apartment that I was only going to see 5 or 6 days a month at most.

 

Been there. Done that. It worked OK until I wanted to find a better company to work for, and then I realized very few companies hire from that state. I even gave them my spiel: "I don't actually live there, it's just a legal residence I set up, and I don't need to be here for hometime ever." Still the companies never seemed flexible on that point, so I ultimately moved to TN. In my opinion, there's not a lot of demand for trucking in South Dakota.

 

OK. I meant none of the companies I was interested in at the time.
That said, I'm still not convinced there's a very big trucking market there. Sioux Falls, the biggest city, has some manufacturing, but it's not a very big city. Mostly the state produces what? Cattle? Probably some good opportunities for cattle haulers. I did a short stint with a flatbedding outfit that had several loads out of South Dakota. The last company I worked for had a couple loads in and out of there. We went way out into the boonies to deliver ag chemicals to farms, which was kind of fun since there was a lot of time spent on lonely little rural highways. I really enjoyed that kind of trucking. Of course, that was during the growing season. I bet those same highways would become death traps when the snow flies.

At this point in my career I'm mostly interested in the simplicity and comfort of dry van.