Good replies, all! Reasons cited for going home include:
To check on your property
To watch your big screen TV
To keep your wife happy
To see the grandchildren
To spend time with family
To complete chores (honey-do list)
To goof off
To get out of the truck to maintain sanity
To continue your role in family, with friends and in the community of which you are part
To regenerate the mental capacity to spend time on the road
To spend time with animals that are fun and relaxing to be around
Because you can
To ride your motorcycle
To recharge your mental batteries
To see your family and dogs
To maintain balance
To share a bed with your wife
I would like to add an alternative to the view held or implied by some that if you do not go home, you do not have a life.
For some, that is no doubt true. There are expediters who go out on the road to work and come back home to live. They see work as something they have to do and life as something they want to do. But there are others that have fully integrated the two. For them, life is fully lived and fully enjoyed both at home and on the road.
That said, let me answer the question I raised. While we go home less than most expediters, we do go. Our one planned trip a year home is to celebrate Christmas with the relatives that then gather. They are scattered around the country and we see them other times too, as the freight takes us close.
Mental recharging, or decompressing as some call it, is vital to our health and happiness on the road or at home. We can tell when it is time. When it is, we generally stop where we are, go out of service, and spend a day or two off in a non-moving truck and with no loads to deal with. With most of the comforts of home in the truck, there is no need to go home or into a hotel to enjoy them.
One thing that being home provides that no place else does, at least none that we have created yet, is a safe parking place for the truck, and the ability to be away from it without worrying if it will be there or be OK when we return.
At home, we can let our guard down in a way that is not possible on the road. No security guard is going to run you off the lot. No taggers are going to spray paint the truck. And if the truck happens to need service or breaks down, vendors already familiar to us will be the ones we call.
If we were to go on a wilderness camping trip or overseas vacation, home would be the only place we would feel comfortable leaving the truck. Without the sense of security home parking provides, the vacation would be less enjoyed.
Another thing home offers is familiarity. It is nice, once in a while to go to a store where you don't have to first figure out where it is and where you will park. At home, you already know. It's also a special treat to dial a phone number without having to dial an area code first.
