Women Who Travel Podcast: A Trucker on Seeing the US By Road

Arizona and New Mexico are my favorite. It is the land of enchantment. It’s magical to see it. The colors of the stone, the orange and the yellow, and when the sun is coming up or going down, the colors change and the sky is just so bright. The spaces are so big, and I think that’s something that I just really have always been attracted to, either if I’m by the ocean or in the desert, I like wide open spaces. And I love to blow my horn, just like the freight train. And when I see the engineer of the train, I wave at them, and they wave at me, and their train horn is a lot louder than mine. Love when the kids ask me with the hand signal to pull my horn.

From the inside of a tractor trailer, you can see a lot. You can see what people are doing in their car, and sometimes they’re doing things they’re not supposed to be doing, especially men. The top of the trailer is 13-6, so you’re pretty high up from the road, but you can see a lot over the sides of the highway. There’s a lot of responsibility. If you even bump somebody, you’re going to hurt them, bad.

The truck is a tractor and a trailer, a tractor trailer combination. The cab is what we call the power unit, or the tractor. Mine was called a sleeper cab. And you make it kind of cozy. You fix it up the way that you want it. You make your little, for me like a little hippie den, and you have your little things like you would have in your own personal bedroom. I like to have carpets on the floor. When I get up in the morning, I like my feet to feel a carpet, no shoes, soft, cozy, and change your environment within just a few feet or inches.

I didn’t ever do the microwave thing, but I did have a toaster, a coffee pot, and this thing, it’s called a lunch box that they sell for truck drivers. They sell it at truck stops and it looks like the old black lunch box that probably your dad took to work a long time ago. But what it is is a little oven that you can put these metal trays in there and cook something, and it gets up to like 350 degrees. So I actually cooked a little Thanksgiving dinner in there one time with mashed potato, stuffing and turkey, and then heated up some spiced apple cider, and it just plugs right into the cigarette lighter.