Sunday Drivin'

DATELINE: HURRICANE MILLS, TN, 5:15 p.m. CST

Miles Today: 456

Hurricane Mills? In Tennessee? Go figure. Anyway, that's my resting pace for the night. I'm at a Pilot Travel Center with a nice, large parking lot. I also stopped early--45 minutes ago--so finding an easy-in parking space was no problem at all. My favorite way for such things to go. It's been mostly an easy day, except for a couple irritants early on.

I woke up and got outta' bed at about 5:15 this morning. (As you recall from yesterday's post, I was at the Flying J in Texarkana, AR.) I went inside for a shower and shave. After that I picked out a chicken burrito and bottle of Diet Coke from their cooler for my breakfast. My intent was to heat up the burrito in their microwave, but when I opened up the package (after paying for it, of course), I discovered a nice colony of blue mold growing on it. So much for that breakfast. So I got my money back and settled for some chocolate mini rice cakes that I have along with me in my truck for breakfast.

I ate some of the rice cakes as I made the 30-minute drive to my pickup in Ashdown, which is about 15 miles north of Texarkana (and the F.J. is 7 miles east of town). The pickup was a drop-and-hook at a company I've been to several times before. The loads we get there are heavy ones, and the company has its own truck scale on site so drivers can make sure their axles all comply with weight restrictions before they leave the site. I had to weigh twice--with a tandem axle adjustment between--to make sure my load was legal. However, since their scale just provides a readout on a sign--no printout--I wanted to use a scale at a truck stop to get printed documentation of that fact in case some state's weigh station scale found differently. So I swung back by the Texarkana Flying J (I had to backtrack that way to head toward the delivery in MA) to use their scale.

After fighting the insane traffic in their lot (it's rather smallish, tight, and many truckers park in places they shouldn't), I finally pulled onto the scale. Flying Js use a different system at their scales than other truck stops--instead of a speaker built into a sign by the driver's window, they have a phone on a post at the back that the driver has to get out of the cab to walk to. (The speaker or phone are for communicating with the fuel desk inside to give truck info and get confirmation that the weighing is complete.) When I reached this place's phone, I found the earpiece broken. Grrrr! So with no way to talk to the desk, I just blew that one off and headed up the road to the next truck stop.

That was another 39 miles up the road (I-30, BTW), a Love's truck stop in Prescott, AR. They have the speaker-in-the-sign system (which all CAT scales do) so I got my truck weighed successfully there. And my truck's axles all weighed in legally to boot! While there I also stopped in the truck stop's Hardee's and picked up a Loaded Breakfast Burrito. 'Bout time for some protein.

After that stop it was just drive, drive, drive. 'Cept for a quick fuel stop at the West Memphis terminal and a late lunch break in Jackson, TN at another Hardee's in a Love's. This time I had a Hawaiian Chicken sandwich and side salad. Tasty. Then it was one more hour of driving to my current location.

All told I drove for 8-1/2 hours today with another 1-1/2 hours of non-driving on-duty time. So 'twas a 10-hour work day for me. My plan for tomorrow is to drive to our Roanoke, VA terminal. I think I should have plenty of time to get that far, though I haven't plotted out the mileage yet. I know I have driven to Roanoke from another truck stop just a little further east of here in one day--my first time to the Roanoke facility and on a day that an ice storm moved in during the latter part of the drive.

Now to answer reader nancy r's query, "Do you listen to any news shows while you're on the road, or is it strictly Books on Tape? There's plenty of interesting things going on in the world lately, for good or bad. Are you keeping up?"

GRAMMAR POLICE CITATION FOR NANCY R: That should be, "There're plenty of interesting things...", not "there's". ;-) Pay your fine next time I'm home.

For the most part it is just audiobooks (some are on CD instead of tape). When I'm in range of NPR stations on weekends I'll listen in on some of my favorite shows (Car Talk, a couple of the humorous news quiz shows, Prairie Home Companion, etc.), but otherwise it's all recorded matter. So, no, I'm not keeping up with world and national events very well. I keep up mostly by headlines on Yahoo when I fire up my laptop and Internet Explorer (Yahoo's my default home page).

So that's how today went. Thanks for checking in, and keep on truckin'.