You’ll be hard-pressed to come across cooler heads than those of the husband-wife team pair of relative trucking newbies I had the pleasure of sitting down with in Hartsville, Tenn., several weeks back. Tommy and Linda Bryant have about a year over the road as a company team with Old Time Express, pulling a dry van and, generally, loving life together after their mid-life switch to the work.
The Bryants outside the Old Time Express Freightliner they pilot.For this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio, we drop into Hartsville Old Time office, where I met the Bryants. Before trucking, with the kids grown and out of the house, Tommy and Linda were already basically spending the vast majority of their days together running a small Hartsville café, the Early Bird, today owned and operated by a son. A road trip taken in a four-wheeler out west, though, gave them an idea of how they could get even closer, and for longer, maximizing as a unit that precious commodity of time, together, as Tommy puts it. What are you doing with work but selling your time to an employer, after all, whether that’s yourself, or, as is the case for the Bryants now, the Old Time Express fleet?
And though Tommy and Linda may be new to trucking, it hasn’t taken them long to see, as both pointed out, the potential value of more flexible sleeper splits, beyond the 8/2 split currently available. Particularly for their team operation. Take a listen:
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If you find yourself running through Hartsville on TN-10 northeast of Nashville and hungry, there’s a mean burger to be had at the Early Bird, which comes complete with eight-seat “liar’s table,” as Tommy says, well-populated around lunchtime, I found.
Stop in and tell ’em we said hi.
