Tag Archives: travel

Why I Love Truck Drivers

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Everyone on the scene was frustrated. Those of us with enough local knowledge to get off the construction-clogged interstate escaped after enduring only two miles of the eight-mile tailback.

The guy behind me drove a macho white truck with one of those grills that moves cows and cop cars out of their way. He was NOT happy, but you couldn’t really call it tailgating when everyone is inching bumper to bumper along the two-lane local side road.

Finally we cleared the interstate snarl from the side road, crossed the overpass, and with a row of commercial semis, my new friend Mr. Grill-against-Mine and I began merging back onto the Interstate.

I could see it coming. Grill Guy planned to surge around me the moment he cleared the merge barrier. So I swept onto the interstate quickly, because if I hadn’t, I would have eliminated the possibility of the semi in front of me getting on at all. And the semis had been nice. They’d kept up their speed and they’d kept a few eejits from going up the shoulder to the exit back when we were all getting off.

Maybe that vibe was flowing from my wee white Prius, given what happened next.

As I took my rightful place on the highway and let the semi ahead of me in, Mr. Grill swerved back around me into the merge lane. Glory be, he was pulling a lawn mower trailer, and the thing swung erratically as he gunned it past me. Giving me a very deliberate and prolonged middle finger out the window.

Either homicidal rage blinded reason, or he flunked geometry in school. Grill Guy swung in front of me without leaving room for the trailer, so I slammed on my brakes.

Meanwhile, from those who had elected to wait patiently through the snarl some miles back, commercial trucks were still coming up the left lane. So when Mr. Grill-not-Geometry swung into the left lane to try and go around the truck I had let in, well, he almost got killed by the truck approaching at a good clip from the left.

This is where I consider him to have made his biggest mistake. He swerved back in front of me, and then, with a semi in front of him and a semi beside him, he flipped them both off.

You know, those guys have radios…..

Suddenly, from behind me a semi appeared. I got into the left lane, anticipating passing the guy Mr. Grill had tried to pass. But that truck driver had other plans. He stayed on Mr. Grill’s left flank, speed for speed. The truck driver ahead slowed down. Like a supporting ballet dancer in tight choreography, the truck behind me got up on the bumper of Grill Guy’s trailer. Mr. Grill was now completely boxed in by three trucks—sustaining an even and prolonged 60-per-hour.

It was like watching orcas hunt.

The road added a left lane after about two miles—something I suspect the truckers knew. They kept their finger-flipping-friend hemmed in while the rest of us passed their box trap.

I risked a peek at the driver boxing their quarry from the left as I passed. He was grinning.

1000 words

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Next week I’ll tell you more about the ship and the people on our Alaskan adventure, and we still have the amazing story of the Aleuts in Juneau and the Russian Orthodox church there, but for this week, please enjoy vicariously the photos we snapped. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is value for time. :]

Every time I woke up, I’d sneak out onto the balcony, and the views were always amazing. This is the first night, when the supermoon had just started waning.

Dawes Glacier was a huge chunk of ice, with pieces breaking off and refreezing over time. It is named for Henry Dawes, a laywer and politician from Massachusetts who apparently knew the right paperwork to file, because it had been named in 1890 by John Muir as Young Glacier after his companion The Rev. Hall Young, but Dawes renamed it in 1891 and the name stuck. The fog started coming in just as we were leaving the glacier; the whiter parts are the ice.

There were so many waterfalls, the disembodied voice that came on the ship’s com and began telling us things said, because there had been significant rainfall the week before. Normally the mountains don’t have so many waterfalls.

Pack ice was all over the place as we went north, always close to shore though. Sometimes they looked like dragons or other mythical creatures and you began to understand why mariners thought they’d seen monsters.

I

The day the entire boat sat silent, taking in the grandeur of the glacier and fjords, we were also freezing on our balconies. Beth and Brandon waved from next door just before securing us all the day’s cocktail: Mallibu hot chocolate (rum added). We never found out how cold it was, but it reminded me of my days in grad school in Newfoundland, when the pack ice would come in and breathing near the ocean felt like ice razors were sliding down your throat.

More next week, including some of the fun fun people and silly things we did. But here’s one final shot of Jack enjoying the views. He said later that the balcony room had paid for itself – and that cruising was his ideal vacation: You sit with a drink in your hand watching the scenery walk past you.