5,500 Safe Miles

In my three weeks out I have driven 5500 miles already, all of them without accidents. I suppose that doesn't sound all that impressive, but it's better than nothing.

This past week we pretty much had all good roads, except for a little bit in Illinois and Indiana, thus I was able to set a new record for miles driven in a day; 616. I averaged a little over 59 miles per hour, and my mentor was quite impressed with that. The most, at least according to Swift, I could do in an 11 hour period is 684, since Swift says you shouldn't be averaging better than 62 miles per hour. Now this may seem odd since we are governed at 65 miles per hour, but you have to remember that just about every hill we have to slow down, also it takes us a while to get up to speed when getting on the freeway, as well as it takes a while to get off the free way. The reason they enforce an average at all is that a lot of drivers will drive by the odometer rather than hours. See, we are limited to driving 11 hours, then we have to take 10 consecutive hours off, but some drivers will drive 600 miles, say it took them 10 hours on their log book (thus averaging 60 MPH) even if it actually took them 12 hours. So the 62 MPH average at least limits how much Swift drivers can cheat on their logs.

While the roads were mostly good this week, it was bloody cold outside. It dropped to zero again in North Dakota, but in Minasota and Wisconsin it dropped to around -17 degrees. Now while these temperatures makes it miserable to leave the truck to go to the bath room or get something to eat, it also makes it a little bit more dangerous too. Apparently Desiel engines don't really like extreme colds like that, and in fact Desiel fuel will actually begin to gel at around -20 degress (which means that the fuel turns into more of a gel than a liquid). To try to prevent this we did add some anti-gelling compound to the fuel tanks, but even then the engines can have lots of problems in such extremem colds. We didn't end up having any, but apparently just this past year my mentor has had his truck break twice in such extreme cold.

Just one last semi-exciting thing that happened. I was driving along at night, the road was kind of windy, I was going along a little slower than the speed limit due to the windy roads when all of a sudden, when I was coming out of a curve there was a deer! Luckily for him he was on the shoulder, but even still it was hard to resist the eurge to swerve the truck to the left to avoid him. Luckily I was able to avoid that. (In case you're wondering, trucks really aren't made for swerving, and at those speeds very likely could have turned the truck over....these things aren't made to do anything quickly, including turning).

Well, that's about it for this week. The route is already starting to get a little boring, really looking forward to getting out on my own and driving other roads. Only 4 weeks left!