Happy New Year to all of you. I hope your holidays were wonderful and drama free.

My time in the Big Apple started out fun and ended just being too long away from the open road. I did fall completely head over heals in love with New York and if I won the lottery I would totally buy an apartment there where anyone I knew could go to stay and fall in love with New York for themselves.

One thing I realized on this trip is that I need a better camera than what I have on my phone. Lady Liberty isn’t as crisp and gorgeous as she should be and that’s a damned shame. Don’t worry, dear readers, it’s on the list for 2018.

On Tuesday (1/2) I headed for Penn Station to take an Amtrak to Rochester so my trainer could pick me up and take me to the truck. Now a smart person, one who has ridden Amtrak several times, knows to check the status of your train before leaving the house. A smart person who’s overly excited to get back to work just blindly goes to the station to find out that the train is delayed due to the tracks breaking.

Ok…Broken tracks, lets talk about that for a minute. I now work in a field that is dangerous for several reasons. I can mitigate some of those dangers by being alert and smart while driving. What scares me is all of the stories talking about our crumbling infrastructure. Hearing about broken train tracks only heightens this feeling of unease but actually being out and seeing overpasses with huge chucks of concrete taken out of them downright terrifies me. If this can keeps being kicked down the road instead of being addressed then more people are going to die. It’s as simple as that.

Sorry for the rant.

One of the things I realized during this time off is that I really missed being at work. That’s something I’ve never had before in my adult life. Work was always a chore and something I had to force myself to go to. It’s just one more example of how I made the right choice in becoming a professional driver.

We finally got a load assignment on Wednesday and off to Ohio we went. It was just in time as the Bomb Cyclone was scheduled to hit the east coast in the next 24-36 hours and I really didn’t want to be here for that. This load would be taking us back across the country to the LA area and I was ready for warmer weather.

Tomorrow we will talk more about the freight I’m hauling. It’s what I’ve termed a Super Secret Squirrel load.

As I got behind the wheel for the first time this year I got a bit nervous. I wondered did I remember everything I needed to? After hooking up to the new trailer I knew it was just like riding a bicycle. Once my first mile was behind me I laughed at myself for being silly.

Total miles driven on first day back on the road: 657.7 along the blue line.