About

About Me:

Smalltown girl

Ambulance-chasing radio reporter

TV reporter and commentator

Chef and first mate on a Caribbean sailboat

Community activist

Daily newspaper consumer columnist

High-level political aide

Backpacking world traveler

New York City business owner

Over-the-road truck driver

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When I was 19, a tarot card reader told me that I would “go far and see much” and write about it in my 50s. Cool, I thought, dismissing the writing-about-it part.

This is the writing-about-it part.

The part where a 50-year-old woman and her 45-year-old husband trade their 450-sq. ft. New York City apartment for a 75 sq. ft. tractor trailer sleeper.

The part where they give up all-night delis for truckstop diners, walk away from forests of skyscrapers that reveal mere patches of sky for lingering landscapes stretched out between mountain ranges, and shelve art gallery and movie openings for Mother Nature’s daily sunrise and sunset spectaculars.

The part where they stop jetting from one part of the country to another and see all those fly-over states up close and personal.

This blog chronicles my drive-about in America from the viewpoint of an outsider and an insider: a smalltown, Canadian-born girl who grew up to be a media elite in her home country and a naturalized American operating a boutique creative services agency with my artist husband in the “Capital of the World,” New York City.

In early 2007, I decided we needed a new adventure. This one started when I read a magazine article about husband-and-wife team truck drivers.

This storyblog began in March 2008 as email letters to our mothers when we arrived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to start truck driving school with Schneider National Inc., where we learned there is both art and science to driving a vehicle that’s as long of a seven-story building is high.

Now we are industry veterans, with more than five years behind the wheel as commercial drivers — we bought our own truck (a Volvo 780) in 2009 — we have experienced four carriers, pulled a temperature-controlled unit and a dry van (an empty box on wheels) and now a open-platform, drop deck trailer.

We have travelled almost 900,000 miles through all of the lower 48 states, and as far north as Hay River, Northwest Territories in Canada and from the western end of the TransCanada Highway in Victoria to the eastern end in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

We have reveled in the great — stunningly gorgeous drives, intriguing places, fascinating people, sumptuous food — and survived the worst, ice storms, pea-soup fogs, torrential rains and road kills of five deer, two hawks and one turtle.

We have gone far and seen much.

And I am writing about it.

– Marlaina