In the fall of 2012, Brielle resident Kimberly Dean and boyfriend Scott Smith found themselves in a difficult spot. All set to move a 28-foot truck loaded with antique furniture the next morning to furnish the Black Dolphin Inn, a new boutique hotel they’d purchased a thousand miles away in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., the U-Haul driver they’d hired suddenly backed out the night before.“We didn’t know what we were going to do. We were on a deadline and had to leave,” said Dean, a 54-year-old real estate agent. Concerned about their timing and the safety of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of items in their truck, they agonized over their last-minute logistical snafu, until they were fortunate enough to contact Cross Country Driver, a Point Pleasant-based operation which transports vehicles and their contents wherever they need to go.“Thankfully, they were available to help us the very next day,” she said.As Dean and Smith began the drive to Florida in their own car on Sunday morning, Cross Country Driver owner Mark Duda commenced his own haul southward, deftly managing mechanical problems with their rented truck along the way to successfully reach their location 22 hours later on Monday morning, no questions asked. “Mark parked our truck, took a cab to Orlando Airport, and then caught a flight back to New Jersey,” Dean said. “He was so professional and such a gentleman and he couldn’t have made it easier for us. It was just miraculous.”Duda, 42, a Union County native who has lived in Point Pleasant for the past decade, launched Cross Country Driver in 2009, after he and his father Richard, 69, a retired truck driver, discussed “how great it would be to build a business that enabled us to see the country at our leisure.” His local advertisements landed them immediate business transporting snowbirds’ vehicles between New Jersey and Florida (a job for which Duda typically charges $1,000 to $1,200 and completes within 24 hours), but word of mouth gradually helped them expand westward. “We’ve since traveled to every one of the 50 states except Hawaii,” he said proudly.You can read about it here: Driving Cross Country.