If you live near Olney, IL… – 2006hrs
You’ll have your fresh Tropicana frozen orange juice at the local WalMart by morning! We got the load to Olney, IL and got unloaded in record time! Only a little more than an hour! It probably would have been even quicker total time, but my instructor had me practice backing in from a 90 degree angle. Believe it or not, it’s not as hard as it seems… although it DID take me two “pull-ups” (when you pull forward to straighten out) to get it done!
We traveled a lesser beaten path today than highways… Route 50 from Cincinnati, OH to Olney, IL is mostly rural… lots of little towns and sharp turns, and several HUGE hills with narrow roads. While there was lots of other trucks, I was pretty white-knuckled the whole way, to the point that about 45 minutes out of the 01, I had to give it over to the instructor. I was just too beat.
The good thing was that it gave me tons and tons of shifting practice. Um.. the bad news? Yeah, I’m still grinding pretty bad on the downshift and a couple of times couldn’t even find the damn gear like I needed to. But I think I’m starting to grind LESS than yesterday? I hope so… I get really frazzled when I’m trying to get 44,000 pounds of frozen Tropicana whoahed up because of a red light! I AM getting MUCH better about being able to down-shift on the uphills though…for some reason it just seems soo much easier! There was one hill where I ended up in 6th (out of ten) gear and even then was only going about 15MPH… BIG hill!
So we got unloaded, and didn’t have another load lined up… so we went up the road a few miles to this little postage-stamp of a truck-stop in the middle of nowhere waiting for the QualComm to beep at us. Because of Ike, we’ve been warned (actually the whole fleet) that freight is getting really screwed up all through the nation’s mid-section.
So we wait…
PS.. I’m wicked bummed tonight… went to suck off a movie from my external hard drive for some entertainment… nuh uh…the fucking thing won’t power up! Dunno what’s wrong…I’ll frig with it another time and see if it’s just the outlet I was in or what… but no love for Joe tonight!
Now you know what truckin is all about,sometimes its pedal to the metal and then you sit and wait for the next dispatch.Sounds like you did good doing your “dock bump”The hardest ones are when you have to back up and angle the tractor to the left and “blind side”dock the trailer.on the drivers mirror all you see is sky,on the other mirror all you see is the side of the trailer.Just a suggestion,When you are downshifting,when you push the clutch in the second time (double clutch)give the throttle a goose to get the rpm”s up before you drop a gear,now some trucks are extremely fussy what rpm range they want to be in or they grind but others dont give a rats ass as long as you rev it up enough.Dont know if you were told that but give it a shot.Keep sending the updates as you have an audience on the edge of their seats.Rich