I got up bright and early this morning from my 10-hour break and waited. And waited. Then, for a change, waited some more. Finally, around 12:45 PM I got a plan summary for some crazy thing with two pickups in Utah and a drop in Illinois on Friday (five days for a thousand mile trip, yikes!). Moments later it got taken off me and I got a new plan. Deadheading back to Ontario, California with an empty trailer.
Except I didn't have an empty as the Conway folks were out of them yesterday. So my fleet manager had me check back over there and I found one and asked if I could take it. They let me make off with it, but while I was doing my pretrip I found the box on the trailer where the electrical line plugs in dangling by the electical connections themselves. Whoever dropped the trailer off certainly realized this as they were detaching power so whoever had trailer 26983 prior to today... THANKS A PANTLOAD!
Utilizing my ghetto mechanical skills, I took some duct tape and mashed it back together and plugged everything in. At least the lights worked. Between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas there is exactly one place that does repairs that I could find, and we don't have an account there so I pressed on to Vegas and a helpful mechanic at the Petro found the right bolts to set everything right again. I even did the work myself.
Today was the hottest I've yet experienced while on the road driving... 112 degrees while in motion in Nevada.
Saw an interesting sign for an eatery in Utah. Clever restaurant name: "Chinese Food". Now if they served Italian, THAT would be something very clever indeed.
I had several opportunities to take some really nice photos as the day wore on but I couldn't bring myself to pull over. I really need to work on that more.
