Truckin'

Truckin', truckin', truckin', Drake and Jan are truckin'.  Rolling down the highway, Yee Haw! 

OK, now SING the opening of this post to the tune "Rawhide".)  For all of you who are too young to know "Rawhide", it is the theme song of a 1950's western TV series.  The song and the break out role of the young cowpuncher, Rowdy Yates, are what the show is remembered for.  If you want to know what actor played Yates and how the tune goes,  Google it on YouTube and someone will sing it badly for you.  Then you can carry it around in your head all day humming it.


It is true; we have joined the ranks of the TRUCKERS.  We are on our virgin drive from Texas to Arizona in a 22 foot long, diesel guzzling, gear grinding, truck.  It's loaded with our storage unit contents.  Drake did his usual superb calcuations, and our 'stuff' just fits......barely.  The movers were surly when they realized they were going to have to WORK to get all the contents into this truck.  The stuff is in; it's padded, and it's strapped down.  The loading aspect of this project went smoothly; much more smoothly that the driving portion of this trip.  Here's the true inside story of what it's like to drive and ride in a BIG TRUCK:

First and foremost, it's NOISY.  You know when you are beside a truck at a stop light and when the light turns green, you hear those gear shifting noises as the truck creeps off from a stop light?  Well, it's twice as loud if you are inside the truck.  The noise is pretty constant.  We've had to talk in louder than normal voices just to hear one another from a distance of 3 feet apart inside the cab.

Second, these rental trucks are the last vehicles in America that still have a bench seat.  For the uninitiated, a bench seat is what bucket seats replaced.  The last bench seat I sat in was in 1967.  I thought they were relics of the past.  They definitely should be extinct relics because there's no support for your back, your shoulders or your neck.  Thus, we crawl down two high metal steps to exit the truck with our muscles aching, aching, aching.  Drake also has the challenge of wrestling this truck down the highway, and he's discovering that his arms and hands tingle long after he's climbed down from the driver's seat. 

When we started off, Drake actually said to me, "Don't you want to try and drive this?"  I looked at him like he had lost his mind.  He laughed, and said, "I know.  I know.  This is a boy job."  (Examples of other boy jobs are:  removing dead animals, climbing on the roof, killing large bugs, and getting wet/cold when going for the car to pick me up.)  I COULD drive this truck - it has automatic transmission and power steering, but why would I WANT to.  Drake, in true boy logic, has stated this is a 'wimp truck'.  It seems pretty macho to me.  We are sitting up the same height as the big boy truckers and have the same view of the landscape.  Here's Highway 180 approaching the Guadalupe Mountains.   

 Another reason I know this is a BIG TRUCK is that Drake has to 'climb it' to wash the windshield.  He's about 3 feet off the ground in this picture.   We are beginning to learn some truck tricks - wide turns so as to not run over the curb with the back wheels, being a road bully and just forcing our way into a lane when a car doesn't realize that we can't stop.  (It takes 4 times longer to stop this truck than it does a regular car.)   We also discovered early on that the truck functions as an impromptu pruning tool, especially on low hanging live oak tree boughs.  (Sorry, Jim!)  Today it was frightenly easy to visualize needing to use the 'runaway truck' ramp at the bottom of a long hill coming down from the El Paso Mountains.  Those steep grades make my heart speed up.  Today we improvised a bathroom stop at a Lowe's in El Paso - big parking lot.  Curiously, we realized it's more comfortable and less noisy to drive on state highways rather than the Interstate.  Our first day was all Interstate and we were both practically deaf and felt like quivering jello that had survived an earthquake when we ended the day. 

Today, we drove mostly on Highway 180 across West Texas, and it was more comfortable.  The scenery was classic West Texas: terra cotta soil and ice blue sky for as far as you can see in every direction.  The oldest houses can not be seen since they are completely covered by trees that arch over the roof all around the house.  New construction is so obvious - the trees are tiny.  I was surprised to see several pecan orchards amid the cotton fields.  We drove through Gaines County today.  This place produces the most cotton in the entire state of Texas.  We drove past the birth place of Quanah Parker, and the largest alkali lake in the United States.  The landscape is also interspersed with slow pumping oil wells, and we saw several natural gas wells.  The resurgence of the oil industry is very apparent in this part of Texas.  There were literally dozens of oil services companies, all very busy, along a 100 mile stretch of highway today.  As soon as you cross over into New Mexico, the cotton fields just end.  It's much more like desert in vegetation.  I speculated that perhaps that's a function of no aquifer.  We drove a 130 mile stretch today where there was nothing - no houses, no trees, no buildings, and almost no other vehicles.  It was one of the best parts of this trek. 

Tomorrow we reach Sun City, and by Friday afternoon all my furniture, boxes, tubs, and bags of clothes will be littered over the rooms of the new house.    As soon as I can get it straightened out, I will send out pix of the  new house.   Until then, we have one more day to savor the trucker's lifestyle.  I'm thinking of taking up 'chew' and drinking Red Bull so I can fit into this trucker culture.