Wow, what a week! – 0357hrs

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…