Why oh why will the trailer doors not shut?

Why, you ask? It is because the morons dock workers left six inches of tires hanging out the back of the packed-to-the-ceiling trailer I am finally set to carry, so the doors won't swing. Not even close. I'd get pictures but cameras are banned here. I took a pic of another bulging trailer just for informational purposes which I will post later.

This Friday the 13th hasn't been a stellar one for me.

Nogales, maybe

After picking up the empty trailer and waiting around the buzzer went off and I find myself with a trip back to Laurens, SC to the same plant I dropped a trailer at earlier to get a load of tires to take to Nogales, AZ -- a nice 2,000 mile trip with the deadhead. So, I pull up anchor and make my way back up I-20 and I-26 and I-395 to the Michelin plant, drop my new empty trailer and wander inside to talk with shipping.

Turns out their operation is vying with Quick 'n Tasty for "Most Dysfunctional Shipping and Receiving 2007" as the load I was supposed to have received was somehow allowed out of the gate, past a security guard who allegedly checks documents, on another earlier CFI truck. So, pantloads of thanks to the shipping department, the gate guard and the elusive Double Pantload^TM to the driver who took the wrong load and didn't bother checking his paperwork.

Spoke with my dispatcher, our people and their people, be patient let's see, yada yada.

Finally finished

After about five hours and a short drive to a second warehouse, my truck was unloaded and I headed a few miles away to the nearest truck stop. It happened to be a Pilot and the restaurant was a McDonalds.

I mention this because I haven't eaten anything but a yearly McMuffin at Micky Dees in probably at least twenty years. I steeled my bowels and tried one of their Premium Chicken Sandwiches. I think I can wait for a couple more decades now before the urge will strike again.

Late in the afternoon I got dispatched for a very early morning dropoff of my empty trailer at a Michelin plant in Laurens, SC then a bobtail south about 100 miles to a Bridgestone plant to pick up an empty. I did as I was told, but when I showed up at the Bridgestone plant they wouldn't let me in because they said they have no empties. Our dispatch shows a dozen trailers of ours inside. Our people are talking with their people, yada yada. Wouldn't even let me park there while it gets straigtened out, either.

UPDATE: After a while they had me return to the Bridgestone plant and pick up an empty. Later, as I was on the phone to my dispatcher, I asked her what the Liar Liar Pants on Fire code for my satellite unit was, as there were at least a half dozen empty CFI trailers there.

The Quick 'n Tasty folks are morons

I arrive here at 0600 to deliver my load of water, and join a line of about six other trucks waiting to get into the same facility. Within the hour another six or eight trucks pull up behind me and we wait. And wait. Eventually a few truckers walk inside to find out what the delay is and about half of the line is sent to another warehouse to get unloaded. I, however, am now at the back of the line of those that were told to stay.

Instead of unloading trucks in the order they arrived this plant seems to do it in the order you walk up (to the other side of the plant; the least driver-friendly location, naturally) so we have trucks cutting in and out of line and just a general mess of a situation. This happens when you have 12 or 14 trucks loaded with the same bunch of water scheduled for 0700 at the same warehouse. Morons.

To Lee, FL then Pendegrass, GA

Like the title says. It took about 5 hours to get unloaded yesterday and a few hours after that I got beeped for a trip up to Georgia. This morning I arrived early, in vain, to see if I could get loaded early at a Nestle water plant but they weren't having any part of that. Eventually I got loaded and drove from northern Florida to just south of Atlanta. I will drop at 0700 local time tomorrow morning to the northeast of Atlanta, about 90 miles away.

Orlando

I got up an hour earlier than I planned this morning and motored down to Orlando, arriving at 8:15 AM local. There are a half-dozen trucks waiting to be unloaded already so it will not be a short wait. By the time they are finished unloading me my work time for today will most likely be up so I'll look to get a load out of here tomorrow.

Childress, TX and its Wal-Mart

For the first time ever, I spent the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I was on state highway 287 in Texas between Amarillo and the DFW metroplex and I was out of supplies when I saw this Wal-Mart pop up on the right side of the road. They even had directions to the proper entry for big rigs and RVs!

When I got into the parking lot I was amazed to find even more signs pointing to Big Rig and RV overnight parking!! Needless to say, I scooted over to the appropriate spot in record time and did my shopping then holed up for the night.

At the moment I'm at our terminal in Lancaster, TX fueling and doing laundry. I will be driving into the wilds of Louisiana this afternoon, perhaps all the way to Lafayette. Lots of hot, humid, rainy weather ahead and a light load in the box.

50 degrees

As I made my way across northern Arizona on I-40 the temperatures climbed to 105. Near Flagstaff clouds gathered and lightning flashed, and the temperature dropped to 55 degrees. A 50 degree drop in less than an hour's travel.

I'm stopped in Holbrook, AZ after having driven 625 miles today. A very good driving day given that half of that time was in California. Speaking of California, I found one of my trailer tires almost flat with a nail in it this morning. The friendly folks at the tire shop next door to the Pilot in Lost Hills fixed that in about 30 minutes, but it seems the upper trailer marker lights were not wanting to work that early in the morning either. A short trip down to the T/A in Buttonwillow and I got that fixed. On the way there I was almost hit by not one but two vehicles running the same red light from different directions! Ah, California.

The good and the bad

I hightailed it down the road 80 miles into the San Francisco area to pick up the load; it turns out it was a "live load", meaning I pulled up to the dock and they started putting stuff in my trailer. This process took five hours and forty-five minutes to complete. I asked several times about the wait and was lied to twice. Such fun.

Eventually they let me depart and I made my way to the nearest freeway. It turns out that I-580 in some spots doesn't allow trucks heavier than four tons and they make you take an offramp at one point. Then about a half mile later, there is an on ramp to the same freeway with no "no truck" sign. I took this and noticed there weren't any other trucks in traffic with me and made my way out to I-5 then south. I passed one flatbed truck pulled over by the local police folks taking a ticket for something.

I wanted to get further but only managed 320 miles today, ending at Lost Hills, CA. I will be up first thing in order to put as much as California behind me as possible before the left coasters awaken and swarm out to their jobs, clogging the roads.

The Mother of All Loads

This morning the satellite beeper goes off as I'm resting in central California... I'm instructed to head in towards San Francisco to pick up a trailer then take it to Orlando, FL. About 2,900 miles all told. Dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Another day, another Conway

I was dispatched to the Santa Fe Springs, CA Conway yard yesterday to take a load out at 10 AM local time this morning up to Dunnigan, CA which is just north of Sacramento. They wanted it there (441 miles north) in just eight hours, in a state that limits my legal speed to 55 MPH. Do the math on a scratch piece of paper then keep reading.

Anyway, they managed to load the trailer by 5 AM and I grabbed it then and boogied without stopping for anything. I made it to Dunnigan this afternoon at 1:10 PM local time, or eight hours and ten minutes later. This was with light traffic, no accidents along the way, good weather, etc. The timing on certain Conway loads sucks and CFI needs to adjust the deliveries if they originate or are bound for 55 MPH states, in my opinion.

Deja view

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.

Arizona and Utah pics

Lots of landscapes and some foliage for those interested:

View all Virgin River Gorge pics

View all Southwest Utah pics

For Mom

Mom wanted a pic of my truck parked near her house. There you go Mom.

Trailers... first you see them, then you don't

I arrived 12 hours early this afternoon at the Conway lot in Salt Lake City, Utah and dropped my full trailer, only to find that none of the CFI trailers there is empty. I called dispatch and they put me on the board in bobtail (sans trailer) mode and put me on my break until 0400 tomorrow morning.

On the way up there was some spectacular scenery in the northwest Arizona / southwest Utah area that I got some pics of. I'm having some difficulties retrieving and processing images from my new camera but will have them up shortly.

Yippee, going to S L C

That is Salt Lake City in case you didn't know. I picked up a Conway load in Fontana that, unusually for them, has a bunch of extra time on it. About 680 miles and doesn't have to be there until Monday at 5 AM local. The trailer was preloaded and ready to go when I arrived, even!

I stopped in Vegas tonight and will arrive in SLC tomorrow afternoon or evening for an early drop so I can get my 10 in and be ready to roll first thing Monday morning.

So, you think you know hot?

Today when I arrived in Las Vegas I got out and fueled up in 112 degree heat. Unpleasant, though only slightly less so than being accosted by the dynamic duo of a poorly-disguised tranny and his/her prostitute friend. My friend Oz suggested I go a few miles north to the Petro to spend the night. Apparently they have a much better class of whore there.

Earlier this week I was in Eloy, AZ on my way out to California and it was warm:

To make matters worse, I look out my passenger-side window after I'm parked to see this CFI truck across the lot:

At first I believed the Simon and Garfunkle reunion may have been a portent of the coming apocalypse. This may be even more obvious proof.

In Memorium

Today I had to do one of the hardest things ever in my life and have my cat Blaze put to sleep. We made it down to San Marcos, California to see her primary vet and after discussion and a lot of thought and tears I had to let her go.

View All Vicious Attack cat pics

Blaze was born in Vancouver, Washington in the fall of 1990. I met her in the spring of 1991 at the local SPCA shelter when I went to adopt a second cat to keep my first cat, Mala, company.

The shelter there kept animals for seven days before putting them down; I was introduced to Blaze on her seventh day and put down a deposit, then waited 24 hours to adopt. I brought her home and she met Mala for the first time. Mala was a people person: she loved to be held, brushed and even slept under the covers in bed most nights. Blaze had been abused by whoever had her before me. She was afraid of any unanticipated noise like a knock at the door or a toilet flushing. This is one of the few pictures I have of both my cats. It was taken in Mexico when I lived there in 2000-2001.

Blaze was exactly the opposite around other animals. She would chase poor Mala around at will and even attacked a poodle once when we lived in Georgia, when it made the mistake of crossing "her" yard.

Before I became a truck driver I moved around a lot and the cats came with me, naturally. Blaze had racked up something on the order of 20,000 miles with me out on the road before she came on to the truck earlier this year, and 60,000 miles or so since. As with the other moves, she took it all in stride.

About a year ago she had a growth removed from under her left eye. The tissue was tested and the results came back positive as a Mast Cell tumor. In dogs this form of cancer is very aggressive, whereas in cats it generally progresses slower.

After she recovered from the operation I flew her down to Mexico during the summer while I worked my last IT job remotely. Here she is trying to cope with the jet lag:

Then in the back yard keeping a lid on things:

Of course, she always kept an eye out for interlopers:

Blaze was spayed before I adopted her so she has no progeny. Unfortunately, feline and canine pet overpopulation requires the killing of approximately 16 million cats and dogs each year here in the US alone. Today, along with Blaze, roughly 40,000 other cats and dogs had to be put down. If you truly consider yourself a cat (or dog) fancier please adopt them from a shelter, have them spayed or neutered, and avoid subsidizing commercial puppy farms.

Buena Park, they said...

Here I thought the load was going to Buena Vista... now it turns out I'm going to be taking it all the way to Buena Park (Los Angeles suburb) myself for delivery tomorrow at noon. I'm stopped for the evening in Eloy, AZ where the mercury hovers at, I kid you not, 123 degrees.

When it rains... its slick

I made it to Laredo this afternoon around 2 PM. Was able to bypass the inspection bay entirely since I had no trailer to inspect! The weather from the Dallas area and south was very rainy in spots.

Blaze isn't doing so well so we paid a visit to a vet in Memphis on Sunday morning. My vet in California had suggested that I be taught how to give Blaze subcutaneous fluids and Dr. Williams in Memphis was more than happy to oblige. He has 17 (!) cats of his own so he knows a thing or two about the species.

I left the animal hospital with a box of medications, two large bags of Lactated Ringer IV fluid plus various other things. Tonight I made the first try at giving her 150cc of fluid. About 100 left the bag and about a third of that sprayed everywhere as she made her getaway from the cold liquid. Will try to do better tomorrow.

In the morning I'm off to El Paso with a very heavy load that is heading out to Buena Vista, CA with another driver.

The bell tolls for... tolls!

On my run this morning from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area to Ohio I had to pay a whopping $65.05 in tolls! Yes, I'll be reimbursed, but the amount of money our public servants get for us to use our own roads is simply outrageous.

The trailer I picked up at oh-dark-thirty this morning was interesting... one of our older ones, and its landing gear was balky. Even though my tractor was backed under it to take off some of the pressure it took a lot of elbow grease to work the gear up and into the ready-to-roll position. Score one for my genes and resulting 6'4" frame.

I messaged ahead to let the driver picking up the relay know that I would arrive about 90 minutes early. He was ready to go when I rolled in and the switch happened quickly... he left me his empty trailer and got the loaded one to take out to the Port of Newark.

Blaze doesn't think much of her new proscription. I have to fight her and pin her down (well, best two out of three at least; sometimes I have to tap out) to give her the liquid. She's received five doses so far and has puked up four of them. The fifth may be bubbling up as I type...

After three or four hours of waiting my satellite unit went off with a curious sequence of dispatch messages. As best I could read it, I was told to take my empty trailer down to just south of Louisville, Kentucky to a Linens n Things distribution center and pick up a full one to take to Laredo. Yes, my very favoritist destination!

The dispatch looked weird and I wanted to ask for a couple more hours to arrive, seeing as I was just doing a drop and hook so I called my fleet manager. It turns out I'm not picking up a trailer! They are deadheading me there to drop my trailer then sending me bobtail (sans trailer) to Laredo! This is about 400 miles deadhead with my trailer and another 1,200 or so bobtail. All paid of course.

The reason for this is that there is an enormous number of full trailers waiting in Laredo for tractors to move them and they don't need any more empties. This will make for some extremely high MPG figures for me this month: I wasn't doing bad with real loads, either.

The downsides are the ride and the weather. Class 8 tractors are designed to haul trailers and the suspensions are set up for the extra weight on the drive tires. No trailer and the suspension is extremely "firm" with lots of bounce on some kinds of pavement. In rain, ice or snow a driver has to be extremely cautious about following distance and sudden application of brakes or steering. Which I will be, of course.

Out of Wisconsin to Ohio on a Conway load

After several hours of down time after I dropped my load this morning, the Mobile Max went off telling me to move south to Franklin, WI to take a Conway load to Ohio tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM. Since I like getting up around 4 AM this could be a very nice one-day run for me, though Chicago may be a problem even at that early hour.

I spoke with my Vet in California this morning and we hashed out a plan where I found a pharmacy and he phoned in an order for some anti-nausea medication for Blaze in liquid form. Apparently, it is the same exact stuff that humans use, just a smaller dose. She wasn't all that impressed when I went to shoot it down her throat but with cats one never really knows.

Wisconsin backing

Yet another interesting back... this time off of a (fairly slow, thank goodness) two-lane side street into this single dock. If my truck was a few feet shorter I would have even been off of the sidewalk area.

View all Wisconsin Backing pics

Wisconsin Sunrise

View all Wisconsin Sunrise pics

Oregon to Wisconsin, via Iowa and Minnesota

The load of wood products I picked up in Oregon had three drops in the midwest. The day I picked up the load I ran out to a place called Hines, OR in the high desert part of the state and stopped at a truck stop there for the night. I had an excellent salad with fried chicken sliced on top -- I will definitely stop there again if I'm through that area. The parking area was unpaved and very dusty, but it did have one of those port-o-lets out there where it was easy to get to. Always a plus.

Many people don't realize that one of the largest arid desert areas in the US is in the rainy Pacific Northwest. Mountain ranges on one side of the state force most clouds to drop their moisture in the form of rain or snow on the west side, in order for the clouds to make it over the mountains. This makes for very little rainfall and a large area of desert to the east.

View all Oregon and Idaho High Desert pics

The following day I got started early and made my way east to Evanston, Wyoming, just over the border from Idaho. While I was in Idaho I stopped for fuel at Mountain Home, and noticed that there happened to be a super Wal-Mart on the other side of the highway with decent truck parking. After I fueled up I spent an hour getting groceries then headed back down the road.

Not every driver performs a thorough pre-trip every morning. Heck, some "drivers" jump up from their bunk to the driver's seat, start her up and get running. This isn't my way, and I'm glad... as when I got up in the morning my driver's-side steer tire was flat. After conferring with our road service folks, they had me air it up at the Pilot I was at and carefully drive about 30 miles to a truck stop that had a repair shop.

The TA truck stop that I arrived at was backlogged at least six hours, so after I tested the tire again and saw the air pressure hadn't gone back down, I went another 38 miles east to the next repair center and they saw me within about 30 minutes. The mechanics there dismounted the tire, looked it over carefully, used a water and detergent mixture to check for leaks but were unable to find any problem with it. Apparently, during the night someone had thought it was a fun idea to let the air out. That solved, I motored down the road to Ogallala, Nebraska and called it a night.

The load was originally scheduled to deliver on Monday the 18th but the deadline was pushed back a day for some reason. I stopped a few miles short at Des Moines, Iowa then the following morning I delivered the first of three drops on schedule. After you drop the first part of a multi-drop load you are dispatched with an arrival time for your second stop, which I saw was the following morning, even though the destination was only 250 miles away. I drove up there by lunch time to find a nearly deserted warehouse but the one guy on the dock didn't have a problem taking his portion of my load a day early. It turned out to be a single pallet of stuff that the shipper couldn't get on to the previous load.

I spent the rest of the afternoon moving towards my third and final drop, which I was scheduled to be at the morning of the 21st -- two days hence and only about 350 miles! This basically gave me two options: deliver on the 20th, a day early, or wait around at some midway point and get in a 34 hour break to reset my Hours of Service clock. I was weighing the merits of each scenario when I saw a sign for a Petro ahead... with a Dairy Queen and a Subway attached, in addition to the Iron Skillet restaurant! Problem solved, choice made. I will force myself to stay in such circumstances for 34 hours for the sake of my logbook.