It's a Team's Life
2025 Mid America Truck Show Wrap-up
Here is to another successful Mid America Tuck Show. It feels like we walked a million miles each day and our bodies let us know that and we probably did. We arrived at our hotel about 1500 hours. We decided this year to leave the truck at the house and get a hotel. Wow what a difference that was. Nice hot shower as long as you wanted every night. We still headed over to the truck parking and met up with our fellow Trucking Solution Group (TSG) members who had arrived. It was nice catching up with them and building our strategies on coving the new layout of the truck show.
The next morning, we were up early and headed over the truck parking area. Met up with TSG members and headed over to the venue to the Landstar hospitality room for breakfast and safety meeting. It still is a very easy walk over. We were able to get our badges right when we went into the south hall area. Since the new free park lot is just by Gate 1 of the convention center, we decided to see if we could walk it. We stopped off for Sandy at the Women In Trucking (WIT) booth to register for the Salute to Women behind the wheel that was going to be Friday afternoon….more on that later.
We started in the North Hall this year and worked our way south. They only used the North, East and South Hall. We really liked this layout and made for less walking since we did not have to would around Freedom Hall. We had VIP passes and were able to get at 10 am three hours early. Sure, does help to cover ground in those three hours. We would highly recommend getting the VIP pass.
In the North Hall we got to visit with some regulars we like too. That would be Dock411, First Guard Insurance (who we have our insurance thru), Lucas Oil Products, Landstar, 7/11 Speedway, BlueParrot, Comdata and TA/Petro. Saw some interesting items in other booths that we might have some new things to add to the truck.
Now onto the East Hall. Did not take long to get through this hall. We only had one stop and that was OOIDA. We had a good conversation with Todd Spence who is the President of OOIDA. We talked about where he thought the industry was going and how the tariffs would affect trucking.
Onto the new almost fully filled South Hall. We got to visit with the following folks. Truck Parking Club, Mother Trucker Yoga, Advantage Lifts, Garmin, Vyper Industries, Sea Foam, Gear Head Lube, Eckert & Associates and Truckers Against Trafficking. Most of these folks we knew and was visiting to see what if anything was new and we could not do without. Then we had not seen, and we think it was their first time attending the show, were Advantage Lift and Vyper Industries. We really liked the look of the car lifts that Advantage had and Kyle did a great job explaining everything. At Vyper we have been following them for awhile and like what we saw of there shop chairs and other things. This was great we could do hands on and see their products. We were sold and will be ordering some in the near future.
Thursday evening, we along with the other members got an invitation to the RoadPro dinner. This was at the BBC Bourbon Barrel Loft in downtown Louisville. Some really great company and conversation but the food was to die for.
Friday up early again and head over to the Landstar hospitality room for breakfast. Since we had covered all the vendors that we wanted to see on Thursday , we spent this day roaming the floor. One of our TSG members told us about a product he found and used to stop rust. So, we looked that booth up and stopped by. The company is RSDW / 7 Strong Industries. The ladies in the booth were so much fun talking, too. They wanted to get to know us before talking about their product. At the end we bought some for two projects we have upcoming. When we left the booth, we felt like we were all family.
At about 1550 we headed to the WIT Salute to Women event on in the south wing on the second floor. They have food, drinks, door prizes (Sandy won some gift cards and coffee). A couple of the things they do at this event is they have all the women CDL holders stand up. Then the last one standing with the most years driving comes up on stage. This year it was Candy Bass -- she has 51-year driving experience and over 7,000,000 accident-free miles.
Friday night we had nothing on the schedule and just relaxed in the hotel and went to bed early.
So, we noticed that both Friday and Saturday the attendance was huge. You could not move through the halls with ease. The attendance was like the mid 2010’s. That was sure nice to see.
Broken record here….Saturday morning up early making over to Landstar for breakfast. Today was our day for the TSG workshop that was at 1300 in the east hall.
We first went to the Mother Trucker Yoga workshop where Hope showed the audience how to stay fit while on the road. Sandy won another door prize.
The TSG workshop was titled “Failing ……..To Succeed”. The group discussed subjects like Changing Carriers, Ignores Advice, Aero Truck, Wide Base Tires, etc. We had a great audience that had questions and comments for us for interaction.
We head home on Saturday afternoon after the show closed. This turned out to be a good year at the show we made some new networking contacts and learned about some new (to us) products.
We are looking forward already to next year's Mid America Truck Show. Once we get recouped from this years.
Sandy & Stephen
We’re Burning Daylight - “Wil Anderson” (The Cowboys) John Wayne