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I arrived in Laredo early Saturday morning and once I made it through the trailer inspection I found myself 17th on the board. After only a two hour wait the satellite unit went off and I went in to choose which load I wanted to deliver. They had one to Canada, one to Mississippi and two to Colorado, all for Monday delivery. One of the Colorado loads delivered first thing in the morning and the other was at 3 PM. I took the later one to give myself more time to get there.
My logbook is very short over the next couple days. I will have a total of 22 driving hours to make the trip of almost 1,100 miles which is pushing it, for a truck. Still, not having to deliver my Laredo load to the broker (closed on the weekends, dang it) is a huge plus so I took what I could get and ran.
The route has me taking a number of Texas state highways between I-10 and Amarillo, then another state highway from there to I-25 just south of the Colorado border, then I-25 the rest of the way into Denver.
As I departed I weighed using the scale at the terminal only to find that the way this load is distributed puts more weight on the trailer tandems than my tractor tandems. 27,000 lbs in back, vs 23,000 in front, despite the tandems being slid back to the stops. Will make for an interesting ride. The weather was very cool, wet and windy.
I drove for four hours up to Segovia, TX (find that on a map sometime... no cheating using a computer to look it up!) and parked at a mom and pop truck stop there overnight. The last hour or so was below freezing with ice, freezing rain and a bit of snow added in for good measure.
In the morning, the interstate was shut down just to the east of Segovia with a big rig overturned and traffic detoured around. Not a good start considering I had to drive over 400 miles today up to Amarillo to have a chance at making my delivery in Denver the following day. I carefully moved northward along a series of state highways, slipping a bit here and there but nothing I couldn't handle. By mid afternoon I had arrived at our fueling stop in Amarillo to fill up my tanks and overnight for the run tomorrow up to Denver.
