soopageek

Location: Knoxville, TN

Russell and I are headed for the company terminal in Atlanta tomorrow. The old beast, as stormodacentury once called her, is being put out to pasture.  That's right folks, I'm getting a new truck!  I was expecting this to happen sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as the odometer was quickly approaching the 400,000 mile mark.  It's happening a bit sooner than I anticipated.  I'm not looking forward to lugging things out of one truck and into another, but I am looking forward to a new truck.  Hopefully it's a new, new truck so I don't have to worry about moving again for a while.  This will make my 5th truck in 3 years.  I'm also hoping to get a Freightliner, as they have much more roomier interiors; a necessity these days with the constant riding companions since I began training.

Anyway, in honor of the the ol' girl, I thought it'd be fun to do a little photo tribute to my time spent with her over the past year.  She is rather photogenic, and I have more photos of her than any other truck I've driven so far.

These first two photos were taken the same day as the one I use in my icon, at a warehouse in Denver.  It was a bright, sunny day and I had just washed her the day before, so she was pretty, shiny and awesome looking.





When I think back over the course of a year, she's been there for a LOT.  She took me to San Diego to see the Beastie Boys and my friend Cara.  At the literal other end of the spectrum, she took me for the first time ever into Maine.  She knows about a secret mission I made in Nevada that I never wrote about on LiveJournal because the photos turned-out so awful.  She survived Jason!  She's been parked under two different shoe trees while I oooohed and ahhhed.

I took the following photo of her while photographing the Indiana Shoe Tree. You can see the stray shoes floating in tree limbs above her.



I took these two at Sand Mountain in Nevada the same day I shot the wintry Nevada Shoe Tree pictures.





She's given rides to welfy, mandy_moon, queenkatieett,  and mrslk.  She even turned The Queen, temporarily into a "bad ass trucker".



She watched silently while I engaged in Hulk Hands tom-foolery with welfy...



...as well as fanciful games of Whosit? with mandy_moon, posing as Claude.



She was driven by stormodacentury and 12 other student drivers.  In fact she's helped me train every single student since I began training last October.

Here's a photo I took of Roger last winter on U.S. 50 in Utah with her....



...and one of Johnny in the San Rafael Swell, in Utah as well.



She even bore me to the town in North Carolina which bears my family's name....



...including the family cemetary.



She's been my home more than any other permanent dwelling for the past twelve months.  From within her small cab I have spent countless hours reading your journals, watching movies, reading books, listening to music, sleeping, eating, laughing, crying, and loving.  I've recevied the news of engagements, weddings, births, and deaths.



I've covered 140,000 miles of road and she's always asked for more.