It was 2017 when Mike Gaffin, aka "The Boston Trucker," received an email from Shell Rotella SuperRigs inviting him to join their team. Over the past several years, Gaffin, a second-generation operator with more than 30 years of experience behind the wheel, had been converting his lifetime love of trucking, and a decades long photographic curation of the business, into one of the largest followings on social media. His likes and views run into the tens of millions, driven largely by his huge Youtube collection: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBostonTrucker

Still, Gaffin initially dismissed Rotella's proposal as a crank email.

But after a phone call, it turned out the offer was legitimate. Gaffin, who still trucks full-time doing local work for A. Cardillo and Sons in Waltham, Massachusetts, has joined the Rotella SuperRigs team at select shows throughout the country ever since.

Overdrive contributor Long Haul Paul Marhoefer caught up with Gaffin at the Mid-America Trucking Show back in March.

Also on the podcast: Another local hauler whose first love was OTR hauling -- and who, like Gaffin, well understands the pressures on, and the difficulties of, life back home for those over the road. Terry Shelton’s road to hauling in a dump truck in the region around Sevierville, Tennessee, flowed through his trucking family growing up farther east in Martinsville, Virginia, and a personal tragedy that befell his family back home that, though long ago, haunts his time on-highway to this day.