what about the local guys? glacier ice comes too mind, friend of the families got started with them and they trained him and got him his class A. he drives the "light loads" (i dont know if thats the right term). hes talking about going up to a semi. been with them for a few years now.

another is my brother in law was telling me around here the farmers need guys to haul there loads ( i live in wine country and there is a lot of cherries, tomatoes, actual wine ect) and most will let you do it with no experiance (according to him, i havnt looked deeper into it). this would build my resume up to the 2 yr requirement then i could go with a bigger company. It also would keep me semi local. He claims he knows people that i could go for once i get the class A.
which leads to do i pay for the school myself or start the 6 month contract for swift to get my license, deal with the crap pay, and then leave and drive for the farmers, local guys, ect.

or there is a possibility im completely off. as i stated in an above post i am not 100% certain yet i want to persue this. i do know i need to find a diffrent line of work before i go insane here. Wife is pushing me but as i keep telling her its not her that will be dealing with the hell till i build up experiance.

Im going to do another run or two with my brother in law and grill him some more. you guys have been bringing up many good points i never considered that i will ask him and some of the others.

btw are there anyone who actually enjoy this work. ive noticed that 3/4 of the replies here are all negative saying it really sucks. :(

so money aside, away from home (possilby aside) what else?

local is the way to go.

:thumbsup:


I love it, making .38 cents a mile, im home every other day, sometimes out for two days, but not that often. :) I would hate to be OTR, my family would fall apart with out me here to help out. My boys would drive the old lady crazy :lol:

teh gubment sayd me am not allwed to hav kids.

I am single with only myself to support, I live in the truck, I do not have a real physical home, my only expenses are that which are required to support myself, I have no bills of any kind. I love driving OTR, as a matter of fact I get rather sour if I sit in the same state or in any particular region for too long :). I am most happy when I am sitting on a load going 1200+ miles, and even more so if I am getting AWAY from the east coast and going west :).

I love driving OTR though, I don't care where I am as long as I keep moving. At current I do not get paid by mile, so I don't really push myself hard to drive a lot of miles every week, but it gets really boring sitting in any one spot for too long.

Funny thing for me, is that for the most part I am a loner, and since I started driving I am actually a lot less a loner then I was, but I still am. I guess the isolation from people in general will drive you to seek out people when you normally wouldn't, but I have never been so isolated that I felt like I was going to go crazy, though I guess for some that are fairly social they would hate it. I don't mind sitting in the middle of nowhere for a while, but I will try to park in a T/S whenever possible only to have the facilities close, and to be able to BS on the CB :thumbsup:

Plus I do as much tourism as possible when I can, it is not always possible but sometimes it is. Like the other day, I had to go from Indy to Winston-Salem, NC. Now normally, if I had a trailer and a load, I would of just took 64 over to 77 and dropped down, but because I had to do it bobtail, I took a very scenic and beutiful ride through the mountains instead. Got to drive through Hazard, KY too, but I didn't see the Dukes! But I will tell you this, there is some amazingly beutiful scenery in the mountains of western KY and the tail of Virginia.

I have done the Las Vegas thing, been to the Mall of America, been to pretty much every major city in the country, gone into Mexico (Not driving over the border though) and Canda, crossed a lot of the more famous mountain passes out west, been to many historical locations (a few weeks ago I drove through the historical park of Gettysburg, don't ask me how I got there because it is restricted, but I ended up there :P), and so many more things that it would take a book :)

For me, I wouldn't do anything else at this point in my life.

I think you are missing the point here, you gave a set of criteria and your circumstances. Given those set of circumstances you asked advice here on whether OTR is a good fit for you. Based on what you asked and information you gave to this board, your question was answered by those who have been in your shoes, and who have been OTR. For someone like "sickrick" otr is a good avenue for him to pursue, he has no family obligations, no home to worry about, he can be somewhat nomadic, nothing that is pressing for him back home. So for him I would recommend OTR whole-heartedly, for you you have family, small children at home, & financial obligations that the OTR pay will not cover. You asked advise based on your needs, and it does not work out for you. Had your circumstances been different, you may have been given different advice.

I would venture to say most here who drive enjoy what they do, I have stated before that when the circumstances are right, I will go back out OTR, I liked it. There does not seem to be a lot of middle ground, you either like it, or you hate it. For some the timing is right, for others it is not. In your case I would say it it not right, you have too much at home that should be your first priority, you CANNOT, give your family the attention they need and deserve being out on the road for 5-6 weeks at a time.

2 years is a long time to be basically separated rom your family and the ones you love. You may think you can handle the separation, but in all honesty alot of the drivers I came across during my time OTR had the same plan as you, get in the time and go local, but the time 1-2 years came around, it had been more like 3-4 years and their families became a statistic of the job. No job is worth sacrificing your time with your family, OTR has a way of destroying families. You may think it won't happen to you, but many before you said the same thing, and guess what, yeah it did.

Listen to what others here have to say, they are not trying to discourage you from following your dream, or whatever, many have been there, and know what it can do to families, I dare say they don't want to see it happen to you. There is an old saying "Those who don't learn from the past, are doomed to re-live it".

No one here can talk you uot of driving OTR if that is what you truely want to do, and I suspect it is, but they can tell you what you have to look forward to, and in the case of someone like you, I think you have been given a lot of good advice, now it is up to you how you use it.

That description of average is wrong, but the description given for a median is correct. An average of numbers is the sum of the numbers divided by the number of numbers, for example let us say we have 1 2 3 4 6 11 12 13 14, the median is 6, the average is 7.1. It is very rare for an average to be lower then the median but it is possible.

It seems there is a diffrence from OTR (what does that stand for anyways?) and local. or is it the same? do you have to start OTR? can i do local starting to build my experiance?

btw im not trying to sound unapriciative of all your advice you guys are giving. im taking it to heart. one thing i forgot to mention is my wife works too. so part of the finances are covered by her. once we get the refi on the house my salery doenst need to start anywere near what i stated. we could survive fine off of 3-400 a week id bring in (on top of hers) till i get better.

the 3-4 weeks on the road at a time scare me some. being away from the wife isnt the issue, its the kids. but if i can do the training (what is it one week class room and 3 weeks on the road?) then come out, do the farmers to get experiance. tighten the belt for the first 2 years then get a gig with a local company and start to make good money then it works right? im fine with being on the road 3-4 days a week. id be home on the weekends or whatever and id see the kids. even an occasional week or two out is fine as long as its not the 4-5 week thing. i dont know if i could handle that.

im rambling sorry. So from reading this and other threads basicaly otr means away from the home for a long time, local means id be home more. do i have this understood right? then you have to have 2 yrs experiance to get with a local permantly and start making good money or lease your own truck.
start pay sucks but from the national median posted 6 months in or so it can be liveable,
i will be away from home through training if i go with a carrier to pay for my schooling.
doing schooling on my own takes the chance of me not finding consistant work when i get out (unless i have connections)
economy sucks balls but will eventualy improve, if i can hang to the 2 yr mark there should be better jobs by then.
im responsible for all tickets
DOT are a bunch of ***holes who ticket you for stupid stuff
in the long haul this can pay very well and i can become more picky about routes i take.

am i getting the jest of it?

Definitions and working conditions of various types of driving jobs:

Local - Usually stay within 600 miles of the terminal you work from, home every day and usually weekends. Usually paid by the hour, usually need 2+ years OTR Experience to even attempt to get a local job.

Regional - Stay within nearby states, usually out a couple days to a week at a time, usually home either every weekend or every other weekend, pretty much the same as OTR except you stay in a region of the country, also usually difficult to get into because regional positions are wanted by the majority of drivers. Most of the larger starter and training companies do offer regional, but will usually want you to drive OTR for a time, and then there is still usually a waiting list.

OTR - Over The Road, usually driving all 48 states, but may be east or western half of the country. Usually you stay out 2 to 6 weeks at a time, the industry average is home 1 day for every week out, so if you stay out for 3 weeks, you usually get 3 days home time.

Those are just general ideas of the 3 main types of driving 'types'.

OTR stand for over the road, and in your last post you brought up another thing that I believe works against you. That is the fact that your wife works as well, now you have two parents that are away from the home. When I went OTR my wife had been laid off from her job, that in itself was good for us, our children were in school, and she could be there when they left in the morning and whern they came home. My wife could be there when I could not, not ideal but workable, sorry but with your wife working, there is going to be too little time for the children. With that last bit of information, I would say, without question,you SHOULD NOT go away and drive OTR.

If you are concerned about the kind of work you can get at home, maybe you don't want to work flipping burgers, or mopping floors, shoveling sh%t, shinning shoes, or a job that you think is beneath you. A real man does not care about those kinds of things, he worries about feeding and taking care of his family. Getting into a truck and running away from your problems is no answer, and I think you know that by now.