Snowy Start

DATELINE: BEAVERDAM, OH, 9:40 p.m. EST

Miles Today: 436

Back to long work days now. I'm scheduled to return home for a weekend off on Friday, and I'm on a new run that'll put getting home on time (within my available work hours) to the test. Here's the scoop.

I woke up this morning to fresh snow on the ground, perhaps an inch of it. My delivery was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in Highland Park, MI, an enclave within the city of Detroit. I left the truck stop in Dexter at 7:45, right at the peak of rush hour. Because of the snow, the road (I-94) was a bit slick (for cars, anyway, I didn't have any problems in my truck), and several incidents made for some slow traffic in places. Most of the way was clear once I left the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, but I encountered a major slowdown once I got into Detroit.

I eventually reached the customer site, about 10 or 15 minutes late due to the traffic. I should have been at least 45 minutes early based on when I got started; shows you how bad the traffic was. Anyway, things went mostly OK at the delivery. It was a live unload and bit slow--almost 2 hours from arrival to departure--and they hadn't plowed, shoveled, or salted their lot, so I spun my wheels a bit while negotiating the lot and dock area.

After finishing up there, I boogied back west on I-94 to a small truck stop in Romulus, MI, just down the road from where I park my truck when I go home. My next assignment came in just before I got there. I had a loaded trailer waiting for me at a large company in Midland, MI (yes, THAT large company in Midland), due for pickup at 3:00. I grabbed a quick sandwich at the truck stop, gobbled it down, and headed north. Well, west first, along I-94 to get to northbound I-275.

As I sped north on 275, then west on I-96, the skies opened up into a heavy snowfall. That slowed traffic quite a bit (the traffic was heavy to begin with). But the squall didn't last terribly long. By the time I got to US-23 it had tapered off a lot, and before I had even reached Flint, the sun was shining. So the rest of the trip to Midland was a snap.

The pickup was a drop-and-hook and went OK, until it was time for me to slide the trailer's tandem axles. The trailer I picked up is an older one, and sometimes things are a little "off" with the older ones. Apparently with this one, its brakes don't hold real well, as its wheels turned while I was backing to slide them forward beneath the trailer. (To slide the tandems, the driver releases the tractor's air brakes while keeping the trailer's engaged after releasing the pins that secure the tandems. The driver then moves the truck forward or backward while the tandem axles remain in place, the trailer sliding on the rails above the tandems. If the tandem's brakes don't hold then the wheels turn and move along with the trailer. Got that? Clear as mud?) I tried for a while with no success, then finally found something to wedge beneath one of the tires to hold it in place. That did the trick. So that confounding problem set me back about 45 minutes.

Once back on the road, I would need to make a stop or two to get some fuel and weigh the truck. Naturally it wound up being 2 stops since the place I stopped for fuel, a Flying J in Saginaw, had one of those scales with the phone missing. Therefore I couldn't get weighed there. So after fueling (and grabbing a sandwich at their Wendy's) I proceeded to a TA a few more miles down I-75 and used their scale instead. Happily my load was legally distributed between all of the axles, so I didn't need to slide the tandems again. Then it was back to the road.

I'm on my way to Albany, GA, in the southern part of the state, with this load, so it'll be all I-75 for quite some time. I deliver the load on Thursday at 11:00 a.m., so I gotta boogie to get there on time. Actually, I should be able to get there OK, but getting back home on Friday'll be a challenge. But today I was able to get this far before my 14-hour window ran out (I started my work day at 7:30 a.m. and reached here at 9:00 p.m.). I should be able to get a goodly ways into GA tomorrow by using my full allotment of 11 driving hours.

But now it's time to finish this up and hit the sack. It's getting late and I'll need to get rolling as soon as my requisite 10-hour break concludes at 7:00 tomorrow morning. Thanks for reading today's communique. Please send me something to read by way of a comment or question, and keep on truckin'.