Arrow Trucking

For the past month, Alan and I have been all about trucking. We have determined that for our kind of lifestyle, driving a truck would be the best way to make extra money to get us out of debt. If Alan drove a truck, we don't need an extra car for him to get to work, I can still work for Air Photo, and he can arrange for a load to be delivered close to where I happen to be at the moment.

So we started out looking at Schneider because they were advertised in AARP magazine as being very retiree friendly. That was a pipe dream. Then we started calling other trucking companies that do training and ran into the same roadblocks. What it boils down to is that Alan has two strikes against him as far as getting hired by any trucking company. Number 1 is that he doesn't have the required 3 years of verifiable work history. We have gotten around this somewhat by coercing our friends to write letters stating that they knew Alan has been retired for the past 6 years. Strike 2 is that he hasn't had his US license for at least six months. Companies need this because they need to verify his driving record. They don't want to hear or see his spotless record in the UK. So those issues have been a thorn in our side for the past few weeks.

So we checked out various drivers schools. We found one (Roadmaster) that claimed they could get Alan a job after school even with the work history/driver's license issue. So we financed $6500 worth of school in San Antonio and Alan went to their 3-week course. It gets down to the next to the last day of school and he still has no pre-hire letters from any of the companies. Guess why!!! The same old thing. On the last day he manages to get a pre-hire letter from a company called Covenant. Now this company is the pits of trucking companies and maybe that's why they'll take everybody and anybody. Drivers who have various issues go to them to get a foot in the door and then they leave once they get experience. Alan will probably have to do the same thing....

...because...

we managed to get Arrow to accept him to orientation. He took the bus ride from hell last week and traveled from San Antonio to Tulsa. He stayed in a filthy hotel and went through Arrow's orientation for five days. He was treated like a non-entity and endured hours of lines where the drivers were herded around like cattle. Every day a few drivers disappeared for whatever reason (failed whiz quiz, failed physical, terrible driving, etc.). By the time Friday rolled around there were 14 guys left to fill 4 jobs. Alan thought he'd have a chance as he'd done well on all their road tests (with the exception of one of the docking tests). But during lunch they called his name to go into the office and they handed him a bus ticket to Waco (where I am now).

What a total let down that was. So he is now back at home, licking his wounded pride. Tomorrow is Monday and we are going to call a few temp agencies in the morning to see if he can get any work driving. We're also going to try Covenant again. He really doesn't want to go there because they have screwed up training (they team drive for six months) but it appears to be the only way he might get work. Besides, we now have this $6500 loan we need to start paying back in October so something has to happen by then.

And that's my update for now. I'm in Waco area for the next three weeks and after that I have a choice of Illinois, Iowa, Montana, or California. California sounds nice but the RV parks there are SUPER expensive. To give you a clue, I'm paying $250 a month for where we are now. I'd like to go to Escondido, CA for the winter but the closest park to where I'll be working is $950 a month. PLUS electric. I've checked several other parks nearby and they either don't have sites big enough for our rig or they're full. But the going rate for the mediocre parks seems to be in the $600 range which I still think is outrageous. That's a dozen pictures I'd have to sell (almost a week's work) just to pay rent.

So that's where we are now. I'll let you all know if Alan gets to Covenant or not and how it goes.