I have a complete new respect for all the truck drivers out there. After traveling half the country in a 45 foot truck/trailer combo I saw traveling via a truck much differently than traveling via small car. I saw truckdrivers from different eyes. My own.
We've traveled all over the country usually in a small compact car for gas economy or Family Van with the kids for room but never have had occasion to travel via big truck.
The first thing I noticed is we had to drive, of course, where the trucks had to park away from the cars in rest areas and information centers. Most of the time it was further away so we had longer to walk. We also had to pull over for any open weigh stations. I didn't know we had to do this but was told by a friend that we did. So when we saw a sign we pulled over. There were only two open and both times we had green lights to keep going. Couldn't quite figure out how this all worked. Never got stopped but did see two trucks stopped at one of these stations with a red light behind them and for us we continued on thru the green light. Either they could weigh us as we went or they were too busy with these two to bother. We didn't know which. But we felt we were packed.
Another thing of course was the difference in gas prices. We had to buy diesel which was much more expensive than gas. And we thought regular gas was high? We got about 10+ mpg instead of our usual 35+ mpg which was better than we thought and spent more than a hundred dollars per fillup. Ouch. That hurt.
What really got me excited (not in a good way) was the fact that people love to cut in front of trucks not wanting to get stuck behind them. This especially was noticeable at a particular toll. As we were approaching a toll booth we saw only two green lights ahead and quite a few cars were cutting to the right because one was for speed pass. It was a slow long line made longer by everyone cutting in on us because we couldn't get the truck going fast enough from a dead stop to prevent it from happening. They'd put their blinker on and just cut right in. Gah! For every car length we managed to crawl ahead, two cars would cut us.
We weren't even allowed in some gas stations. At the first exit in PA we decided to get gas. As we were getting off coming to a light we saw a sign that said no trucks. Great. Now what? Too late now. We had no choice. A Shell station loomed ahead. We drove in and I immediately saw another "no trucks" sign. They had no diesel and it was a tight little gas station. It was also a busy road right there so I had to get out of the truck and do some directing to get hubby out of a tight spot. When I jumped back into the truck as he was about to cross the road to get back on the pike, I acquired a new name, "Trucker Mama."
Along the way we went by what looked like a very bad accident between two semis. They both got pretty beat up. Scary. It's not easy driving these big trucks and those semis were very big.
By the end of the trip and a few unsuspecting curbs later, we think we finally figured it all out. The last two legs, one 9 hours, the other 5 hours went by pretty flawlessly and we were very grateful for the excellent weather the whole trip considering we had heard snow and ice were at one time predicted around the time of travel. Didn't happen. Thank God.
So after having this new mode of transportation for six days back to Budget it went according to schedule. After refillingl the tank and one more curb go over for ol' times sake we are back to driving only the Suburu. It feels like a go-cart in comparison. But I'm real happy with my 25+ gas mileage.