answeing questions and various other things

1. I am going to try and make a video for you guys.  This way you will get to "meet me in person". Right now, my boss will not allow me to bring the truck to the school.  His concern is safety and insurance liability.  The video will include a tour of the inside of my truck.  It isn't much to see but it's home to me five nights a week.

2. I drive for G and H motor freight out of Greenfield, Iowa. The company has been in existence since 1947 by hauling freight from Greenfield to Omaha, Ne and Des Moines, Iowa.
in 2012 we have about 60 trucks on the road. Our area of operation goes from Laredo, Texas to the south, to Bismarck North Daktoa to the northwest and then to Social Circle Georgia in the southeast. We go as far east as central Pennsylvania.

3. Some of the commodities I have hauled in 9 years of driving truck are listed below:
Drywall/building materials
Food, both frozen and dry
paper
envelopes
sand
lumber
coils of steel
ammunition
tools
machinery
and the list goes on and on and on and on.

4. I have had the honor of driving truck in 47 of the lower 48 states. Although I have visited the state of Maine, I have never driven my truck in that state.  I visited there for 3 days back in 1998 when I was on active duty with the U S Navy.

5. Getting a commercial drivers license is not easy.  You must be at least 18 years of age and complete a truck driving school. Some schools are as short as 2 weeks long and others as long as 3 months. 2 weeks is waaaaaaaaaaay to short. There is just not enough time to learn even the basics.

Time for me to sign off and get to bed in a few. I have to listen to the end of the baseball game im listening to. Im a huge fan of the Detroit Tigers!

Mr Johnson

pictures

Dear Class,
Ok, I finally figured out how to post pictures on this blog. It's only taken me about a year to figure that out!

The pictures were taken 08/29/11 at a rest area in northfield, mn.  That is about 20 miles south of Minneapolis and St Paul, commonly known as the twin cities, since they are so close together.

About my truck:
it's a 2005 freightliner with 735,000 miles on it.  From the front bumper of the truck to the rear bumper of the trailer is 75ft long. With an empty trailer and the truck being full of fuel, it weighs just over 34k lbs.  when its fully loaded it can weigh as much as 80,000 lbs.  The average automobile weighs about 4 to 5k lbs!  My truck carries 300 gallons of fuel. The average automobile carries 20 gallons.

I started driving truck in June of 2002. Since then I have traveled approximately 1.3 million miles. How many miles does that average out to in a 1 year time?

wow

I did not realize how long its been since i posted here. I am going to be reinventing myself in this blogspot. I initially wanted to use this as a learning tool for how to drive around trucks. Now along with that I am going to us this to keep in contact with my students.  You see, I am a part of a program called truckerbuddy. The purpose of this program is to educate school age children about trucking. I have been assigned a local class and will be using this blog for that purpose.