Posted by admin on Oct 31, 2008 in
Where Am I? Whoo Hooo for me! Rolling through Walcott, Iowa this evening, I started to get that all-to-familiar bladder twinge right around Exit 280. Much to my surprise, I saw a billboard for a TA coming up at Exit 284…hmmm that number sounds familiar… OH YEAH!! WALCOTT, IA!! IOWA 80!!! Home of the world’s largest truck stop, some truckers would even call it Mecca has parking for over 800 trucks, boasts the largest retail facility dedicated to trucking (it would rival any Super-walmart!), and has been a “dream” of mine to stop there ever since I decided to go on this crazy grand adventure! (Please don’t remind me of the LAST time I was in Walcott, IA..m’kay?)
Anyways… didn’t do the tourista / a.k.a. Mr. Wong thing this time (yes I DID snap a couple…I’ll post them later), but just hit the fuel island long enough to drain the bladder and grab a fresh cup o’ Joe. Let me tell you, hands down, THE best cup of trucker coffee I’ve had yet. I don’t know if I hit the pot just right, mixed it just right, or somehow the austere surroundings made it TASTE better… but it was a mighty fine cup indeed!
So…once that was done (definitely make plans to return there for a more “tourista” type visit someday)… I rolled on down (over?) the highway of I80 towards Chicago, arriving here in Mantena, Illinois about a half hour ago to find that the receiver is closed for the night. <sigh>
The GOOD news is we are pre-planned for a pick-up tomorrow morning… HERE in Manena… going (ya ready for this?)… National City, California! Yup…left coast bound…again! ROFLMAO It’s nice piling on the miles…AND I’ll get to make the same trip through Vegas, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert all over again! Just snapping photos from the opposite angle! ROFLMAO
By the way people… when you’re out there in your “four-wheelers” (what we call your cars)… Please, please, PLEASE don’t try to race us coming onto a highway on-ramp in a desperate attempt to get in front of our slow-asses! IF we can get over, we will usually… if we don’t, it’s because someone is on our left that you can’t see and trying desperately to get your tired-ass old car to move faster to get ahead of us is only going to end badly…FOR YOU!!
I damn near put some middle-aged woman and her kids in the guard rail today because she tried to race up from behind me on the right merging onto the highway. I had already had a rig with several cars behind on my left and couldn’t go anywhere… needless to say the only thing I could is try to slow down, but the stupid… (witch..yeah that’s it) only tried to insist on merging honking her damn horn the whole time. A quick blast on the air horns and the impending impact with the closing guard-rail ultimately convinced her she should apply HER brakes and get behind me where there was plenty of room.
She came around my arse-end, and barreling up to my drivers door, and with her two small kids in the back, gave me the one-finger salute.
In the end, there was some poetic justice about it all though… in her fevered mind to make sure I knew her feelings about being in HER way on HER highway when SHE wanted to come on…she damn near rear-ended the car in front of her, had to jam on the brakes HARD… then realized… oh yeah, this exit coming up was hers and she slid back in behind me and got off the highway.
<sigh> Dumbass four-wheelers
Posted by admin on Oct 30, 2008 in
Where Am I? Been another busy couple of days… got our load into LA (Walnut, CA a suburb of LA actually) without incident… ran into a bit of an issue with the reciever however; by policy, when we bump a dock, the first thing the driver is supposed to do is turn off the refer unit. See the way those things work is that they blow cold (or hot!) air through a canvas “tube” along the roof to the rear of the trailer, where it sinks to the slotted floor to be returned to the refer unit and reconditioned. When you open the back doors (as in when docked) it just blows that conditioned air into the dock area, and subsequently sucks the warm dock air in through the floor of the trailer, thus making the refer run harder and warming up the product quicker.
BUT…
The dumpass receivers only know that if the refer isn’t running, it must not be cooling thier product, hence…hissy fit! So this receiver says the product is ruined (a load of Tropicana orange juice) that was to be maintained at 32 degrees (BUT keep from freezing the Bills Of Laden – BOL say! ROFLMAO)… they claimed that because we bumped the dock at 1400 hours, and they couldn’t be bothered to start unloading us for an hour and a half with the refer NOT running, the product must be ruined. Well…we had their dock dork call Prime’s honchos to get things straightened out…hence the customer pulled the product off the truck and check it again… ‘magine that…right at 32 degrees where it’s supposed to be!
Anyways… we bugged outta there in a hurry and headed up to the Frieghtliner of LA to have them look at our driveshaft (front one of the two)… it’s starting to rust where the yolk connects to the driveshaft, making us nervous that it might puke the shaft going down the road.
Once we got there, we had already gotten our next load assignement (picking up in Earlimart, CA north of Bakersfield…however LA Frieghtliner couldn’t see us until late the next day… AFTER our scheduled pick-up time.
Well, we blew off the driveshaft (hoping like hell!) and scooted north to the next load… we arrived at the 0900 appointment time, got our load going to Manteno, IL due Friday at 0700. Because we needed to go Northeast of LA, we back-tracked to catch I15 our of Cali going into Nevada and Colorado.
Man what a ride! In the space of 24 hours I went from LA, through the Mojave desert, through Death Valley (where the dash temp computer said it was 117 outside the truck!) to Vail and Denver Colorado!
BTW…let me backup a minute and say the drive out of LA to Earlimart was friggin awesome too! Leaving LA on I10 North, you have to go through this wicked winding, mountainous terrain know to truckers as Grapevine. It’s one of the place truckers “cut thier teeth” sort-to-speak because it’ll test your nerves with 7% grades, lots of curves and heavy LA traffic. Well, because we were empty, I got to play “super-trucker” and go flying by all the slow-boys loaded and handled Grapevine with ease! Next on the list… Donner’s Pass <gulp>
For some of you dear readers that have been observant… I’ve already posted some pics up to the Flikr account of the journey through the Mojave, Death Valley (passed through Vegas at night which doesn’t photograph worth a shit), then earlier this morning going through Vail, Colorado… breath taking all of it is all I can say… I’ll throw a few pics as a sample below, but make sure you take a look at the entire album!
So… current day… my shift began in Denver where we jumped on I76 North into Nebraska… let me tell you..what a boring, dull, shitty highway that is! Flat, straight and the most exciting thing in all of the barren terrain I could see was a farmer tending his fence with a quad-bike and herding dog while the cows stood there and watched him! <YAWN>
Caught I80 (my old friend!) in Nebraska and headed East into Omaha, NE where I currently sit at the Frieghtliner here in town. My co-driver headed over to his house for some wife time while I watch the load and try to get the truck checked in first thing in the morning.
We’ll head out (pending repair time) around 1800 tomorrow (tonight) for Illinois, or, if the repairs take too long, we’ll hand this load off to another driver to finish up and go from there.
So what’s with the title of the post you ask? Well… with Charles at home, the truck to myself… it’s off to bunk-land for a few hours of shut-eye! I’m too old to party anyways!
EDIT: Update: When we first pulled in here tonight, we thought they were closed. Turns out, we were wrong, they ARE 24/7 and I just talked to a real decent mechanic “Jeff” here who looked at the driveshaft…
“No problem man. That’s just a grease cap that’s rusting… those drive-trains are life-time sealed with grease and where your lease is up in December, I wouldn’t worry about it at all”
Um..OKAY!! WHOO HOOOO! Shot off a text to Charles to let him and know…
Posted by admin on Oct 27, 2008 in
Where Am I? Well, we delivered our load into Florida on time (of course!) We almost immediately got assigned another load…going to Los Angeles, California for Wednesday. The GOOD thing is that they’ll take the load early, so we’re hauling ass to get there Monday so it’ll go on this week’s pay-period! So…adding up the week we’ve done about 6300 miles total… whew! Dat’s a lotta driving!
Anyways…Joe’s a tired boy…
Posted by admin on Oct 24, 2008 in
Where Am I? Obviously I made it into Omaha without further incident… we left out of Charles house Tuesday morning and started a roller coaster ride!
We picked up an empty trailer and headed over to Des Moines, Iowa to pick up a load of dead pigs (NO, not the while thing…pieces parts… frozen), that load was headed to Virginia. We started out and hadn’t gotten very far down the road when we got a call from dispatch saying that another truck had broken down in Booklyn, Iowa with a HVL (High-value load) and would need us to drop our trailer at the truck stop and take over on the HVL. So we met up with those guys, had to use a tire chain to pull the dead tractor out from under the trailer (apparently these rigs don’t move on thier own much when they puke the drive-shaft!)
So we got rolling with HVL… going to Boise, Idaho! A load of chewing tobacco, and because it’s an HVL we have additional security measures we have to follow, including not telling anyone (even other Prime drivers) that we HAVE an HVL, where we got it, where it’s going, and what the contents are among other things. One of the biggest security things is that one person of the team must stay with the truck at all times, and we have to “phone home” to dispatch everytime we need to stop with all THOSE details.
Anyways I digress… we head Westbound on I80 and cruise along just fine… then we get a call (after several hours of driving) from dispatch again. There’s a guy at Little America, Wyoming that is trying to get home to Idaho and they want us to swap loads with him, giving him the HVL and us taking his load of ice cream headed for Clearview, Utah. Well, we’re going that way anyways and we get “credit” for the miles we put on the HVL so what the hell.
We meet up with that driver and swap loads at the truck stop there and hit the road again… we no sooner got up to speed when we got a qualcomm from dispatch telling us to not roll out yet! Charles calls the night dispatcher to find out what’s going on, and come to find out, the guy we just gave the HVL to doesn’t have his Cuff-lock (a cuff-lock is a device that locks over the two air-brake knobs for the tractor and trailer and prevent someone from releasing the brakes, thus taking the trailer – a MUST HAVE on HVL loads!)
So we stop at the next rest area and wait for the other guy to catch back up so we can give him Charles set of cuff-lock and Abloy locks (high-security locks…all of them keyed the same and a very expensive set).
Okay… we’re off again! We finally arrive at Clearview, Utah and drop that load, then bobtail down to Salt Lake City, Utah to our yard there to pick up a load waiting to go to Plant City, Florida!
Yup.. more I80! Which is where you now find me… actually we got off I80 a couple of hours ago and are now in Missouri heading south. This load is due in Florida by 0700 Saturday morning so we don’t have a lot of time to waste in getting there.
I’ve posted some pics I’ve taken with my new digital camera out on my flickr account… but when I got up Wednesday morning..this was the view out MY cubicle:
Remind me to tell you about the meals we’ve been eating since leaving Omaha… we’ve gotten a fridge before we left so we now can cook and store food on the truck and stop eating at all the damn truck stops! WHOO HOOO!!
More later…
Posted by admin on Oct 19, 2008 in
Where Am I? Well, I flew out of Portland last night into Philly without a hitch…then caught the second leg of my journey to Omaha into Chicago where my luggage was kind enough to greet me! That was around 2200hrs last night… decided that since my next flight wasn’t until 0930 this morning, and as I’m getting older and don’t like to sleep in terminals too much these days…and I had ALL my luggage (couldn’t check it into the next flight that early)…I figured I’d bite the bullet and pay for a hotel room at the Hilton O’Hare. VERY nice…VERY swanky (had a 53″ LCD in the room which was nice…as was the leather recliner!)…of course the room rate reflected that niceness…but I digress.
So I get up and outta the Hilton and into the airport through security and all without a hitch…hang out at the gate…got there an hour and a half early. Per United instructions, you just sit and wait for them to call your name to assign your seat TO you…so I wait…and I wait…and they start calling for boarding… and still I wait. The get DONE with boarding… and I wait… (yes, I DID check with the gate person on the status of my seat…both times was told she would call me). So I wait some more… “Final boarding call to Omaha”
WTF!?!?!?
Finally the gate agent says, “We’re sorry sir, we’ve over-booked the aircraft and need to bump you. For you compensation, we’re going to put you up in a hotel for tonight, and give you a free round-trip ticket good to anywhere in the US good for one full year. The next Omaha flight isn’t until tomorrow morning at 5:40am”
Um..okay?
So… I’m holed up at the Wyndam hotel in Rosemont Village… bored, Mr. Wong appeared about Noon and decided to grab a subway train ride into down-town Chicago! Visited the Sears Tower and went up to the Skytower on the 103rd floor, then proceeded to walk around downtown Chicago for the next four hours!
So… wake-up call at 0300 for tomorrow to get over the airport for the 0540 boarding (BTW…I’m pre-booked with a seat assignment for that flight!). Here’s what Mr. Wong saw today! (Click the image to jump to the photo album and see the rest of them)
