Just got home after driving across the Florida Panhandle on I-10
Returning from a trip to Meridian, MS where we swapped trailers with a driver and headed back to Jacksonville yesterday around 3 PM. We headed straight south to Mobile and then East on ten.
Everything was fine till about the 90 mile marker (I-10 is 362 miles across Florida) where I started to see debris on the shoulders - pine needles mostly.
Around the 120 or so I started seeing downed trees being blown from the north to the south, so the westbound lanes were most affected. The stretch where the eye crossed over the interstate was, as one might expect, fairly clean, but around the 130 or so, near Marianna, FL. it started to get real bad.
Now, this drive across the panhandle took place from about 8 PM eastern last night, when I crossed the line near Pensacola, till about 4 AM when we got to Jax, so the winds had pretty much ended. What we (I say "we" cause I had a co-driver) had to deal with was the incredible amount of trees and branches fallen across the interstate.
From about the 120 to the 165 it was like driving on a windy, country road, constantly weaving around entire trees fallen over one lane or the other. At the 165 we came to a standstill. After about 90 minutes, and watching several pieces of heavy equipment pass on the shoulder (Skid-steers, backhoes, etc.) we started crawling forward. What had held up traffic was a car hauler that had tried to go around a tree covering the right lane and he dipped his left wheel set off into the mud on drivers left. This is the kind of car hauler that has about 5 inches of ground clearance and once he sunk to the point that the bottom of his rig was scraping the edge of the pavement, that was all she wrote. He's probably still there!
After we got past him it was another 35 miles of back and forth, weaving from lane to lane around trees till we reached Tallahassee (which was dark, BTW) where we swapped drivers. From then on it was smooth sailing.
Remarkably, I only saw 4 tractor trailers on their sides, two in rapid succession that were covering the right lane (they'll probably wait till daylight to remove them and when they do, they're going to have to shut down the road in order to get the wreckers in the right spot) and one blown over and resting precariously on a bridge at an exit lane where a truck stop was located! Looked like the driver was trying to make it to safety and at the last moment, a wind gust had other plans for his rig.
It got pretty hairy at times, as the trees were incredibly difficult to see in the dark, even with high beams on. A ride that takes 5 hours or so normally, took us 8 to complete. The cleanup is going to take a couple days, as the number of trees that need to be removed from both sides of the freeway number in the hundreds.
But I'm home, safe and sound and just a couple minor scratches on the tractor where we had to squeeze by the tips of branches!
Ahhhhh...the joys of OTR Truckin'! It's what I signed up for 30 something years ago!
= new reply since forum marked as read
...as a 10 yr old, I was a huge Movin' On fan (Do it like Pruitt! 
), so I was drawn to that occupation at a very young age. Unfortunately, not what I do for a living now, but I've often had this "hankering" to be an OTR driver. 
That poor driver on the bridge. Hope all his problems today are aggravations.
