Heading Back To...

DATELINE: MARSHALL, IL, 7:45 p.m. EST

Miles Today: 506

Another long day. That happens a lot on these days when I have a delivery and another pickup; in order to get my full allotment of driving hours in I need to take the full 14-hour window. Especially when the new load needs to go a long way with no excess time built into the trip. So here's the scoop on my day.

Up early enough for a shower, shave, and quick breakfast before rolling at 6:00. The roads were clear--the crews had salted away all of the ice--and I reached my destination 30 minutes early. This was easily the most challenging delivery I've had, in that I had to do some tricky backing maneuvers in some narrow lanes. I'm too tired now to write out the whole story, but suffice it to say that I'm glad it came after I've been doing this for over a year now (including training), instead of when I first started. But I finally did get through that delivery, then waited on the street in front of the business for my next assignment.

That came in after a brief interval. I was to head to Romulus, MI to make my 5th pickup at a business there. The drive there took an hour, and the loading was pretty quick--I was in & out of there within 45 minutes. So now I'm taking this load--can you guess? That's right, I'm on my way back to Texas on more time. Back to the Dallas area, this time to the town of Roanoke. It's just north of Fort Worth, so it's a little further west in that metroplex than I've been before. Delivery is scheduled for noon on Wednesday, so I have 49 hours from pickup to delivery to drive the 1200+ miles to get there.

This time I decided to take the "northern route" to get there. Instead of the usual I-75 to I-71 (Cincinnati) to I-65 (Louisville) to I-40 (Nashville) to I-30 (Little Rock) route, I'm going via I-94 to I-69 (mid-MI) to I-70 (India-no-place) to I-44 (St. Louis) to I-35 (Oklahoma City). I'm counting on the bad weather in the plains to have cleared up by the time I get there tomorrow. The routes are just about the same distance, and I'm just so tired of that southern swing that I've made so frequently lately. It's funny that reader/commenter "smudman" mentioned talking to people in Oklahoma City about the ice problems there, because that's where I'm headed tomorrow.

Tonight I've stopped at a rest area just inside the eastern edge of Illinois. I wanted to make it to Effingham, but my 14 hours were just about up. I had about 55 miles to Effingham and only 30 minutes left and when I stopped. But that's OK; IL has good rest areas with plenty of truck parking, and no "No Overnight Parking" regulations. This state gets an "A" on my rest area grading scale--it'd be an "A+", but the restroom facilities could be a bit bigger and nicer.

So that's today's tale. Thanks once again for checking up on me. Drop me a line, and keep on truckin'.