E.N.G.L.A.N.D. stands for . . .

Soon after I started driving for CR England in January, someone told me what a number of the trucking company names are actually acronyms for. WERNER----We Employ Rookies No Experience Required, CFI --Cant Find Interstate, SWIFT---Sure Wish I Finished Training or Sexy Women in Freightliner Trucks, CRST ---Cedar Rapids Stunt Team, and ENGLAND ---Every New Guy Leaves After Ninety Days. Interestingly, on my 86th day of solo driving for England, and six weeks without a day off, I started to feel bad vibes coming from both my driver manager and England corporate. Despite my weekly reports putting me in the top 20% of drivers in every category - miles run, on-time deliveries, highest fuel mileage, etc. - I was getting clear indications that England no longer wanted me. A quick survey of other trucking companies revealed JB HUNT (Just Beginning to Hold Up Nation's Traffic) which seemed to have all the requirements I was seeking and would also give me a 57% pay raise to $0.41/mile (the highest pay I could find for a driver with only six months of experience). On my 100th day of solo driving, I returned my truck to England, took a week off in Salt Lake and made a quick trip down to Great Basin National Park where I got up to 11,400.

Orientation for JB Hunt was in Memphis Tennessee so I found a cheap flight to St.Louis (got all my stuff down to two fifty pound containers, one of them the case for the bike that converts into a bike trailer (as seen in the photo),biked 20 miles along the Mississippi, tasted some great beer, attended a blues festival, and at three in the morning caught a Greyhound to Memphis. Orientation took four days and now I'm back on the road, currently doing a 34 hour reset in Augusta Georgia after a quick visit to Tulsa (a very nice town (with incredible bike trails) which I hope I can explore more in the future ). My truck is pretty much the same as the one I drove for England except I realized just yesterday (after four days of driving) that this transmission is a ten speed instead of a nine. I'd been shifting from 4th to 6th and wondering why it was such a big rpm jump. Duh.