Truck Day

Pantanal, Brazil

We leave a six am to start our first long drive of the tour (though Steve and I just did it a week ago). It’s about 2200 kilometers (at least like Seattle to San Francisco) and takes two full days. I used to sit up front for all of these drives, but it’s become a bit of a problem because I have a tendency to sleep most of the way and when I’m not sleeping I’m reading. For some reason this seems to annoy Steve (or whichever driver I happen to have), so I’ve taken to hanging out in the house (the pax area). This lets the pax alternate up front where the best views are and gives Steve somebody new to talk to every couple of hours or so.

In the back of Doris we have 34 comfortable-ish seats, with two tables for playing cards or whatever up front and a jack to plug in your Ipod. Each drive day I give a description about what’s happening, where we’re going and usually a small lecture on the history, politics or whatnot of the area. The first long drive day is always kind of a test for the pax as a lot of them are from the UK and have absolutely no idea how big South America is. For many of them a 40 minute drive is something reserved for vacations and in 18 hours they can go from the top of Scotland to the bottom of England (where they keep trying to convince me are some lovely beaches. I don’t believe them). Sometimes I’ll do a trivia game or something to keep them occupied. My last trip I made the mistake of having a truck sangria party on one of the longer days and had to deal with things thrown out the window, congo lines up and down the truck, and an absolutely destroyed house with sticky sangria everywhere which in some flash of insanity I volunteered to clean up. I have a feeling, though; this group is a little more relaxed.

After a long day of driving, we find a hotel at 11 pm.