Wednesday: Today was one of those days where everything seemed to go by in a bit of a blur. As usual, we started the day by going to a truck stop so my trainer could get coffee. :p Once we actually got to work, I reconnected to the trailer and drove five hours non-stop to get us close to where we delivered. The trainer took over from there, since he wanted to show me some of the more difficult maneuvers and sign reading that I'd have to do; even with both of us looking, we nearly missed one truck route sign. The route also had a few exceedingly tight turns, which I'm just not comfortable making yet.
While we were waiting on our unload, I worked on some of my homework, though reading the atlas gives me a splitting headache; I'm increasingly tempted to use the computer to work out the basic route and merely use the atlas to verify that the route is legal for a truck to drive on. I also received my first evaluation, and nothing on it came as a surprise at all; I lost points in every area that I expected to lose credit in and none of the areas in which I felt I was doing well. I'll probably get two more such evaluations before I'm done with training (one early next week, and one at the end of the two week training period). My goal is to receive a perfect score on my last evaluation to show that I'm ready to drive the truck on my own. Tomorrow's going to be an exceptionally long day, since we have roughly 600 miles to drive for our next assignment (120 to pick up the load, and 500 to the delivery); I just hope that I can get a full night of restful sleep so I'm ready to drive when my break ends at 5AM.
Thursday: Easily the longest day I've had so far. I drove over 400 miles today and worked a full eleven hours. We still have driving to do for our current load, but we should be able to drop it off relatively early tomorrow, likely well before noon. The trainer still wants to get an early stop tomorrow night, despite starting early, but that's reasonable considering that we're running fairly close to hitting the seventy-hour cap right now. In any case, the driving was a rather pleasant mix of things, from country driving to city driving, from back roads to Interstates, and over long hills both up and down. The instructor had me going rather uncomfortably fast around some of them, but I at least kept the vehicle (mostly) under control.
Apparently I'm doing much better than the average student, except in the few places that I'm having problems, such as backing the truck in. I still can just barely get it where I want it to be after several attempts, which is definitely unacceptable. The instructor has said he's going to spend some time working with me on that, but so far I'm still everything except confident in my ability to back the truck anywhere. Even given a wide area and plenty of room to maneuver, I'd struggle to get into a dock or parking space. I really hope that I can get that figured out, because once I do, everything else is just about golden.
After the drop off tomorrow morning, my trainer is going to let me handle just about everything else as if I were driving solo. Basically, it'll be a trial by fire at that point, and entirely on me to get everything done. That's not to say that I won't have help if I need it, but if I don't need the assistance I'll be left to handle it all myself. It's going to be quite the experience, but I'm rather confident that I can get it done... well, as long as I keep the tractor in a forward gear...
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