Miles 'n Miles 'n Repairs 'n Miles 'n Miles

DATELINE: VAN BUREN, AR, 8:30 p.m. CDT

Gentle Readers,
My humblest apologies for the absence of updates these last few days. I haven't been ignoring you; I've just had some very lengthy days and been too tired to think straight enough to compose prose up to my usual, Pulitzer-standard standards. ;-) But let me take a stab at a quickie catch-up.

Tuesday, 584 miles
This was a day just about driving, driving, driving. Since my delivery was set for 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday in Jacksonville, I needed to get close by the end of Tuesday's drive. Mission accomplished as I reached a TA truck stop in Baldwin, FL, just a few miles west of J'ville. Interesting note: the air in the area was all smoky, kind of like fog, due to the wildfires in GA and FL. Kinda' eerie, although the area was not in any immediate danger of becoming ablaze.

Wednesday, 75 miles
What? I thought I said this was a busy day? How so with only 75 miles in the books? Well, it started as I finished my morning delivery. It was a drop-and-hook, in which I just drop my loaded trailer at the site and pick up an empty one that's already there. Well, I happened to pick the W-R-O-N-G empty. Since this was a customer site and not a USA Truck terminal, the selection of USA trailers to choose from was very slim. In fact, the one I took was the second one I tried to hook up to; I couldn't hook up the air lines on the first one--bad connectors, known as "glad hands". So I took option number two. Once done with that delivery and hookup, my next assignment came in almost immediately: Zip around to the other side of town and pick up a load bound for eastern Oklahoma, delivery on Friday.

The pickup time for that assignment was 9:00 a.m. I had been early to the delivery, but I just headed around town to the next site. I arrived there at 6:30 and found they weren't open yet. ('Twas a smaller company without round-the-clock hours like the big ones.) Someone finally arrived in their office at around 8:00...but their power was out. This place has a scale and needs to weigh the trucks as they come in and leave, and without power their scale was out of commission. Pretty ironic considering that practically across the street was a nuke power plant with a couple of big cooling towers. Anyway, long story short, power was restored and I was loaded and weighed before 9:00. Then the fun started.

After getting off the scale, I pulled to the side to slide the trailer's tandems forward (they had been all the way back, a fact I hadn't noticed when I picked up the trailer to begin with). With a 45,000 pound load, I needed to move them forward to distribute the weight evenly between the trailer's tandems and the truck's drive tires. With the tandems all the way back, there was too much weight on the drives to be legal. I'll skip the discussion on the axle limits and gross vehicle weights for now. I pulled the tandem release lever, climbed back into the truck, released the truck's parking brakes, keeping the trailer's brakes engaged, then put it into reverse. That should have slid the trailer along the top of the tandems, but instead the tires rolled! Oh-oh. The trailer brakes weren't holding. Once again, long story short: I called in to the Breakdown department, and they sent me back to the TA from whence I started the day to get the brakes repaired.

Long story short again ('cuz I'm tired again today, but I owe you loyal readers some news), I got back to the TA at around 9:30 a.m. or so, and the repairs weren't done 'til about 7:00 the next morning.

Thursday, 524 miles
There is more to that story, but I'll spare you--or rather, myself--that for now. Once repaired (and the tandems slid forward), I needed to hit the scale at the TA to make sure all my axles were legal. Nope; still too much weight on the drives. I encountered problems pulling the tandem release lever because of the weight of the load, yada, yada, yada, needed to re-weigh twice, yada, yada, yada, wound up taking almost another 2 hours to get on the road. Sheesh!

Finally on the road, I figured I had just enough time to make it to my destination by the end of the delivery window, 3:00 p.m. Friday. By the end of my allotted driving hours on Thursday I had made it to Winnfield, AL and pulled into a truck stop there for the night.

Friday (Today), 638 miles
Up early to complete the L-O-N-G trek to Muskogee, OK. I had to stop at USA's West Memphis, AR terminal (which was along today's route) to fuel up, since I had last done that in Baldwin before hitting the TA's shop for the trailer repairs. 'Twas a long day of driving, but I did reach the site at just about 3:00. (Woulda' been a bit earlier if someone there had answered the phone one of the several times I called to get precise directions for the direction from whence I was coming. Instead I had to figure it out on my own by looping around the town to reach the point the directions I had from USA came into play.) That delivery went nice 'n quick--musta' been a record for the shortest live unload of my short career. I soon had my next assignment, to pick up a load in SW AR at 10:00 p.m. I didn't have enough available work hours for today to get there for that pickup time, so I'll head there tomorrow the morning to get it. In the meantime, I did have just enough driving time left today to get back here to USA's HQ/terminal in Van Buren. From here it'll be a straight shot (well, as straight as the road goes) south down US-71 to the pickup in the morning.

And that's where the road has led me so far. I apologize again for missing a few days of updates. It has been hectic this week, and I'll have to have some downtime soon as I'm going to hit my 70-hour limit this weekend (16-1/2 hours left for the next 3 days, and I'll probably use up 11 or more tomorrow). Thanks again for your interest in my complainfest--er, trucking career. Please do let me know you're looking in by sending in some commentary. And do keep on truckin'.