Kennedy Space Center, Florida. We had a load to pick up.
"Not all those who wander are lost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
By the time we started Miles 2 Go Transport, I'd lived in seven states and two countries. Every move except Las Vegas, NV was for work. Vegas was the one we chose — the first place we lived because we wanted to, not because a job said so.
And Vegas is where, with my husband, we decided we were going to drive trucks for a living.
Before the Truck
Before all of this, I had a career.
Not a job — a career. Merchandising and buying for major ecommerce companies. Amazon. Sears. Walmart. The kind of work that comes with a real title, a real salary, a real desk, and a real expectation that you'll be at that desk for the next thirty years.
I was good at it. That's the part nobody warns you about. You can be good at something that's slowly killing you, and the better you get, the harder it is to leave. The promotions become the cage. The salary becomes the cage. The competence becomes the cage.
Yantian Container Terminals, Shenzhen. The other end of the supply chain.
Weekends. Holidays. The laptop came on vacation with me. It was a sickness.
For a while I told myself the restlessness was the problem. That I just needed to find the right company, the right city, the right team. So I moved. And moved again. And the restlessness moved with me.
A friend on Facebook asked if I was in witness protection.
I took a job at Walmart and moved to the Bay Area. Walmart was supposed to be it. People work there for decades. Eighteen months in, they restructured me out.
By then I was already married, and we were already planning to move to London. The restructuring just put a date on it.
I'd spent a decade trying to find the right cubicle. The cubicle kept telling me to leave.
For a while after that, I helped my husband run his business. He was in cybersecurity. We worked with governments more than companies, and most of what we did was over my head.
I was glad to be out of corporate. I was less sure what I was doing instead.
Vegas, and the Decision
Las Vegas is a strange place to land if you're trying to slow down. It's a city built for tourists, not for people who actually live there. But we'd been everywhere by then, and Vegas sounded fun.
My husband started thinking about trucking before I did. He'd researched it for months — the schools, the pay, the way the industry actually worked underneath the marketing. I knew he was looking into it. I didn't take it seriously until he came home one day and told me he'd enrolled.
I still wasn't sold.
Then he came back from school and told me the part that changed everything: we could run as a team. We could bring Thumper.
I signed up the next day.
Impulsive, maybe. But decisive.
The Lessons
Trucking school taught me how to drive a truck. It didn't teach me how to be a trucker. That part you have to learn from the road.
We started where almost every new CDL holder starts: as company drivers for a mega-carrier.
Top Gun Driver Academy.
The mega surprised me. I'd heard the same complaints everyone hears about big mega-carriers, and some of them are fair, but the part nobody talks about is the safety training. They were serious about it. They put us through a program called Top Gun — invitation-only, not advertised, the kind of thing they don't even tell you exists until you're in it. We spent six months with the mega-carrier, and a lot of who I am as a driver today came from those months.
We left because a mid-sized carrier paid better, and they had a six months minimum requirement. That's how the industry works. The first job teaches you to drive. The second job is your first real job and everything builds on time spent. I mean everything. (Something else I learned about the industry)
Four months into our time with the mid-sized carrier, we bought our own truck. We ran under the mid-sized carriers authority for two more months while we sorted out our own authority.
Miles 2 Go Transport was born the day we bought our first truck, and we named the company after a Robert Frost poem, but no one catches that.
Buying day. We didn't know what we were buying.
The truck, a 2023 Kenworth T680 — first year of the Next Gen, beautiful, less than a year old. The dealership that sold it to us was super shady and went out of business less than a year later. The truck lived in the shop and cost us a small fortune. When Hurricane Milton came through and flooded it, we called that one an act of God.
The first year on our own authority taught us yet another lesson: the loadboard isn't built for teams. We could be two days early to a delivery and the receiver wouldn't bump the appointment. Just told us to wait. The team advantage, the thing that was supposed to make M2GT competitive, got eaten by the schedule every time.
We thought we'd be getting paid so well it would be worth it. It wasn't.
How we found FedEx Custom Critical was an accident / blessing.
FedEx Custom Critical, its their show and their authority. At first I declined, but less than a week later, I was signing up.
That call became a program that finally fit the way we worked. Expedited freight rewards teams. Two drivers, one truck, time-critical loads — the model M2GT had been trying to make work on the loadboard suddenly made sense.
We have grown so much since joining FXCC. We've grown in the number of trucks in our fleet, we've grown in our understanding of the trucking industry, and we've grown in our appreciation of all of the drivers who take on this very unique lifestyle.
Why trucking
I love photographing the road almost as much as I love driving it.
There's something about being on the road for weeks at a time that changes how you look at the country. You stop seeing it as places you go. You start seeing it as places that are doing things — making weather, growing trees, building light. Every state has its own atmosphere, and after enough miles you can almost feel the state line before the sign tells you.
These are a few of the moments I caught with my phone from the cab.
So many trees — not just shrubs, but acres and acres of trees.
Pilot Mountain, North Carolina
I saw these cars on the way through, but I didn't have time to grab my phone. Trucking is like second chances.
US 50 — Delta, Colorado
A road cut through stone. The mundane sometimes turns beautiful.
I-75 — Orlando, Kentucky
Grey day. Felt like the sunshine was imminent.
I-70 W — Thompson, Utah
This country is so crazy, some parts never see snow and other parts are snowing in May.
I-70 W — Colorado
The lone palm surviving the concrete jungle.
Florida Keys
Feels like a Disney ride. I understand why Walt chose Florida for the Magic Kingdom.
Central Florida
Deserts have the best sunsets. I grew up in one. Nothing else compares.
I-10 — Benson, Arizona
Sometimes the world reflects something in your soul. If you're lucky, you can capture it.
US 50 — Delta, Colorado
There's a lot of disrespect for drivers — usually from people who've never done the job. We don't tolerate it. Our drivers are professionals, and we treat them that way.
— "E", M2GT
Thumper & Rocky
Thumper and Rocky aren't passengers. They're crew.
This is the back of the truck on any given afternoon. Pet-friendly isn't a policy at M2GT — it's how the company operates, because it's how we live.
Why We Built This
Most trucking companies are named after their owners, their states, or their trucks. We named ours after a poem.
Robert Frost wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in 1922. It's four stanzas about a traveler who pauses on a winter road to watch the snow fall in a quiet stretch of woods. He notices that the woods are lovely and he could stay, but then he keeps going. The poem ends:
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Frost repeats the line. It's the same words twice but it isn't the same meaning. The first time, it's literal — there's distance left to cover before the day ends. The second time, it's everything else. The promises you've made. The work that's yours. The reasons you keep going.
That's what M2GT is. We took our corporate burnout and our cybersecurity-firm-in-London middle years and our two dogs and our trucking school certificates and we built a company we actually wanted to work for. We built it for drivers who notice when the woods are lovely and keep going anyway. We built it because expedited freight matters, and because the people who move it deserve to be treated like the professionals they are.
Miles to go. That's the whole job.