Why do we go to MATS?

In the days leading up to the Mid-America Trucking Show, something starts to stir inside you.

With all of the prep work and scheduling, it can be overwhelming. This is one place every year that you will find darn near everything imaginable you need to make, build or continue a successful trucking business.

With the wide array there of equipment, products, services and professional organizations like OOIDA – which has your back year round – it makes good sense that you should go if at all possible.

But there are still other emotions – excitement and a longing that stirs, too. Thoughts rush through your brain millions at a time.

There are so many you can’t get a grasp on any one in particular.

Yet, you know you need to go. It’s almost an involuntary, unconscious force that pulls you to the three-day trucking mecca.

It’s a lot like the way James Earl Jones’ character Terence Mann described the “Field of Dreams.”

You go for reasons you can’t even fathom. You turn into the Exposition Center driveway not knowing for sure what this year will bring. You arrive at the door as excited as children. Of course we won’t mind if you look around, they say.

You walk into the crowds of people, drawn by that same unknown force. You’ll find they have aisle after aisle of everything great about trucking. And you’ll soak it all in, and it’ll be as if you dipped yourself in magic waters. The memories will be so thick you’ll have to brush them away from your face – months after you leave.

People will come. One constant through all the years, has been trucking. It has rolled by and through America, providing a pulse for the lives we live. It has carried with it a mystique and fascination of both those who live it and those who watch it roll by.

But it has marked the times. This industry, this life: It’s a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again. Oh ... people will come. People will most definitely come.