Ok, it is a sure sign that your brand new truck has been sitting in the driveway too long when you start sprouting little oak trees in the hood hand-grip.

Never thought we'd be using the truck as a planter

Mucking around hip-deep in the pits of hell … thanks for asking.

I’ll give the short version of the tale so y’all won’t be bored to death. Well… you may remember that back at the beginning of March we finally fulfilled our long-held plan (dream) and purchased a beautiful new Freightliner tractor. It still hasn’t hauled a single load. Yep… it’s just been sitting in the driveway looking beautiful and sucking cash out of us every month. I don’t think I ever mentioned it at the time, but we also bought a trailer in April which is also sitting around empty and useless. Sigh.

Not that the truck or trailer are actually useless… that would be me. We’re not sure exactly when it happened, but I injured the hell out of myself probably sometime in January. It was one of those things that start slow and proceed to get worse week after week to the point that you realize you are only about a week or so from being bed-bound. Agonizing pain. Legs virtually useless. Spirit crushed.

For the longest time we thought it was some sort of injury to my knees or legs as it was so hard to walk. Naturally when we left USXpress we lost our insurance and we didn’t get the COBRA insurance because we thought it was too expensive. So I didn’t want to go to a doctor and create a pre-existing condition. Also, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the medical community in this instance… I could envision MRIs and exploratory surgery on my knees and god knows what all. Horrifying. Instead, we searched the internet and asked everyone we knew about the situation and came up with what seemed like a good plan to get me back on my feet. We were wrong. Things just kept getting worse. Less mobility. Every step more painful. Getting in the truck literally impossible.

Then I remembered that our cousin Ingrid had mentioned her best friend had gone through something similar and had gotten it fixed. I made an appointment with an excellent Chiropractor/Physical Therapist that Stace’s step-dad uses. First meeting he took x-rays and said, “Oh well there’s your problem” while pointing at the film. It was never my legs — it was my lower back the whole time. The x-rays were so obvious even I could read them and see the problem.

So my treatment/rehab began about two weeks ago. What they don’t tell you when you start something like that is that it is going to hurt a hell of a lot worse before it gets better. Well… I mean he did tell me that… but I didn’t think anything could hurt worse so I guess I didn’t take him seriously. I was obviously mistaken. Monday, Wednesday, Friday… treatments from hell. Tuesday, Thursday… stretching exercises from hell at home. Weekends… more stretching… more hell. Sigh.

During this entire time, Stace has had to do everything around the house. I mean literally everything that needed to be done around the house. All the shopping. All the cooking. The cleaning. The laundry. The errands. She also got the new truck all decorated and homey and loaded up and ready to roll all by herself. Not to mention waiting on me like I’m some 90 year old woman who can’t do much more for herself than wipe her own ass. Sigh. Honestly… she has been amazing. Not one complaint has passed her lips. I don’t know how I would have made it through this without her.

And I am making it through. For the first time in a very long time I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The pain has lessened significantly. Although I’m still using a cane, I’m walking better and able to do more for myself. The doctor seems to think I will only need another week or two of treatments and I’ll be ready to roll down the highways again. It feels like he may be right. Whew! Can’t wait to hit the road… if nothing else because we never planned to spend six months at home so this whole episode has brought us to the brink of financial disaster. All that planning and waiting and saving and we’re not in any better shape than if we had just flung caution to the wind and bought a truck years ago without any financial safety net. On the other hand, I guess we should just consider ourselves lucky that we had the savings that have made it possible to survive for six months with no income and still buy the truck and trailer. See… I’m able to look at the bright side again… that’s surely a sign I’m finally getting better.

So anyway, that’s about all there is to the story. I haven’t been around simply because I’ve been so angry, bitter and depressed that I haven’t had anything to say that any of y’all would want to read… trust me. But I can finally see a universe in which I am back to my goofy pain-free self in the near future. Expect more blathering in the near future.

I haven’t been too interested in politics for quite awhile now. I’m really still not, but OOIDA, the Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Association sent out a bulletin today and its message hits straight home for all American truck drivers.

The dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over the NAFTA agreement to open our borders to Mexican truck drivers and trucking companies has been going on for many years now. After the last election, a halt was put to the Bush administration’s test program, and Mexico retaliated by raising their tariffs. It would have been nice if this had settled the issue, but everything is still up in the air on what might or might not be done in the future.

Here is a quote from today’s warning e-mail from OOIDA –

Yesterday the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a new campaign to push the White House and Congress to open U.S. roads to Mexico-domiciled trucking companies and truck drivers.  Though the Chamber has been pushing for Mexican trucks for many years, this campaign comes at a time when the organization is setting records for its spending on lobbying.  Public records show that the US Chamber had over $123 million in lobbying expenses last year alone.

Don’t be confused by its name, the US Chamber of Commerce carries the water for multi-national corporations and does not represent the interests of local and state chamber of commerce organizations.  They have incredibly deep pockets and no qualms about using their money to push the government to take actions that will economically benefit their largest members even if those actions trample on hardworking Americans and jeopardize the safety and security of our country.

As you read this, the Chamber and its allies are calling on Congressmen and twisting the arms of government officials.  They see the fallout from the tariffs that Mexico has imposed on US exports as the best opportunity they have had in years to force open our border and our roads to truckers from Mexico.  They well know that companies and drivers from Mexico will be cheap and exploitable.

I think all of us in trucking should be concerned about this new campaign, regardless of whether you are an owner-operator or a company driver. We will not be able to compete financially, and U.S. drivers will see wages drop and jobs disappear. Our futures are in jeopardy.

I also think anyone who drives on our highways should be concerned about this new campaign. Your safety could be at issue here.

We know money talks, and all we have to fight that cash is our voices. If you believe, like we do, that enough American jobs have been outsourced to other countries, I encourage you to contact your U.S. Senators and Representative to let them know how you feel about allowing Mexican truck drivers on our highways.

In addition, OOIDA has put out a call to action, asking citizens to call their congressman and tell him/her to sign Congressman Peter DeFazio’s letter which asks that NAFTA be renegotiated to exclude opening our borders to Mexican truck drivers and companies.

In my experience, I figure we’ll all just get screwed. It seems like Big Money always wins. Been happening for decades now in other industries and trucking looks likely to become just one more lost cause. I’ve called my congressman anyway. What the hell. It only took a few minutes.

I know of one mega-big U.S. trucking company which bought loads of land in Mexico last year. The buzz is they will be building terminals there.

Sigh.

We are up in Kansas City… PICKING UP OUR NEW TRUCK!!

That’s right folks… the quest is finally over. Financing is arranged, approved and signed. Truck is awesome looking. Dyno was great. BlowBy almost nothing. This is a done deal and the truck will be in our driveway tomorrow night.

In the end, we punked out and decided to go for a newer truck with a warranty. There is something highly attractive about buying an old… really old… truck and getting into the whole deal for next to nothing. But when you start looking at the constant repair bills you’re facing and all the down-time that goes along with that, a newer truck that costs more up-front starts looking much better. Besides, we both find warranties to be very sexy. We were hoping to find a Century or Columbia in the 2005 or 2006 range with about 600k miles on it.

So we called around when we got back from OKC and started talking to this guy in Kansas City. And he has been awesome to work with on getting this deal put together. At first we didn’t think anyone would want to finance us because we have literally no credit history as far as purchasing things. I mean we have really good credit card credit scores, but we bought the house from a family member and bought the vehicles so long ago that they don’t count for crap. So we might as well have been a couple of 18-year-old kids as far as the financing companies see it. Add to that the fact that we’re first time owner-operators and the crap really starts hitting the fan. The only thing we have going for us is we’re both experienced drivers. Even OOIDA was telling us that we were going to need 30% down and that we should expect to pay about 16 to 17 percent interest on the loan. Hell, we figured out that we could just put the damned truck on a credit card and pay less interest. Sigh. That was pretty much a downer, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Then Shawn went to work for us and found us a great deal. Only required 15% down payment and only charged 13% interest on the balance. Plus, he and Angela got us financed for a much newer truck than we had dared to hope for with far fewer miles and with great big kick-ass warranties. Yet they still managed to keep the payments exactly in the range we were looking for.

So here’s the low-down on the new truck:

• 2007 Freightliner Century with 427k miles
• Detroit 60 Series 14L @ 515 horsepower with opti-idle (not too sure about that opti-idle business but we plan to get an apu as soon as we can so no big deal)
• 13 speed OD EatonFuller tranny and 3.42 ratio
• 229″ wheelbase w/ 4 airbag suspension
• All aluminum wheels with 22.5LP virgin tires
• Dual 150 gallon fuel tanks (woohoo!)
• Dual exhaust
• Dual chain hangers already installed
• Chrome gauges (whatever)
• Fancy-pants two-toned paint job (too fancy for us, but great at scale houses since fancier-pantsier trucks tend to get the green light more often than the duct-taped hoopty trucks)
• 3 year/300k mile drive-train warranty (serious woohoo!)
• 1 year/100k most everything on the truck warranty (double serious woohoo!)

We are very happy campers right now. I was telling Stace that, if this truck turns out to be as good over time as we hope it will, I don’t ever plan to buy a truck from anyone but Shawn. He, and Angela his finance guru, have really worked overtime to get us in a good truck with a good deal and make us happy with the whole experience. I suppose we might have gotten a better deal if we had kept looking, but I feel pretty dang satisfied with the deal we got and needless to say I am thrilled that the search is finally — at long last — over. Maybe now Fernando can think about something other than trucks all day every day. Like trailers for example… now we need a trailer.

Here’s a couple of pics of the new and improved HagMobile:

Fancy, huh? No need to pull that looker behind the scale house, Officer Fife.

Pretty standard Freightliner look

Okay... not generally a huge fan of the blue bunk but in this case I'm willing to make an exception and really learn to love all that blue