Kingdom City, AR

DATELINE: KINGDOM CITY, MO, 9:45 p.m. CDT

Back to work as of last night (after a long wait siting on a load over the Memorial Day holiday). My delivery was scheduled for 10:00 p.m., so I got rolling at 8:00 from Hebron, IN. I got to the customer about 9:15 or so, then waited a few minutes in a line of trucks to get into the site. The wait wasn't long, and I made the delivery--a drop-and-hook--fairly quickly. While I was hooking up my new empty trailer (after backing the loaded one into a dock door and dropping it there), my next assignment came in: Pick up a load in Naperville, IL at 11:00 the next morning.

It was just about 10:00 p.m. when the assignment came in, so I'd have to find a place to park for a 10-hour break before getting that next load. Of course, there aren't any truck stops right in the Chicagoland area; one has to boogie a few miles down any of several highways to get to one. (There are the Oases along the I-294 tollway, but their truck parking lots are very small, and at that time of night they'd be overstuffed. So I didn't even bother trying them.) I chose to head west on I-80, and found refuge at a TA in Morris, IL. That was at 11:00, so with a 10-hour break I'd get back on the road at 9:00; plenty of time to get to the pickup just early enough.

So I went to bed right about midnight last night, then inexplicably woke up around 5:15 this morning. For some unknown reason I just can't seem to get a good, long, uninterrupted stretch of sleep these days. Anyway, after semi-dozing/semi-waking for a half hour or so, I just got up. I had plenty of time to kill before I could start working (that 10-hour break is mandatory), and I was getting pretty hungry (I'd been eating a bit less the last couple of days), so I caved and treated myself to a real breakfast at the IHOP across the street. A steak omelet and side of pancakes filled me up just right, enough to hold me for a good while. After breakfast, I filled my remaining downtime with a shower and some light reading before it was time to get to work.

The drive to my pickup took an hour. Yada yada, check-in, dock, live load, all told took a couple hours before I could get underway to my delivery. By the way, that load was due for delivery at 8:00 tonight in Fulton, MO. So I had about 7-1/2 hours to make the alleged 350-mile trip. Fortunately, after that big breakfast, I didn't need to stop en route for a meal, though I did at one point munch on a couple of Pop-Tarts from my in-truck larder.

A curious thing happened on the way. I stopped at a rest area and, while stopped, retrieved a couple of messages from my Qualcomm box. I was typing in a reply to one when the thing went blank. That's nothing new--it normally shuts itself off after the truck's been shut off for a while. But this time the truck hadn't been off for nearly long enough. I started the engine and the box came back to life as normal, but all the messages in the buffer had disappeared (it keeps about the last 40 or 50 that the driver can scroll through). Hmmm. But I finished my reply, hit SEND, and thought nothing more of it as I got back on the road.

I reached my delivery 30 minutes early, despite slow, heavy rush-hour traffic around St. Louis. This was another drop-and-hook delivery, so it didn't take long again. (The longest part was selecting among the 5 or 6 empty USA trailers there to choose the least bad one. They were all older and beat up.) However, in attempting to compose and send in my "Arrived at Final Stop" message via Qualcomm, I discovered that my box didn't have the macro messages available. (We hit the "Create Message" key, then type in the number of the macro we want to use, and the message form appears on the screen.) When I typed in the "11" for the Arrived macro, the thing just beeped at me, which it does for any error. Hmmm. Not good. So I decided that, it being after 8:00 already, I'd just head to the Petro truck stop back at the exit where I got off the highway to head to Fulton.

So now I'm here. Once I parked (the place was mostly full, but I found a spot!), I called in to Dispatch to let them know that I had completed the delivery and to report my futzed-up Qualcomm. I was expecting them to direct me to a terminal for repairs, but instead they gave me my next assignment over the phone. I'll be picking up a load in Belle, MO, kinda' southeast from here, in the morning, but originally the pickup time was 10:30 tonight. Now, that would assuredly have put me beyond my 14 hour driving window for today (I started work at 9:00 a.m., so 11:00 p.m. woulda' been it), so I talked them into letting me take my 10 and go get the load in the morning. Delivery is at 4:00 p.m. that afternoon in Searcy, AR, so I'll still have plenty of time to get there on time if I get the day started right after completing my 10 hours of break. Which will be at 6:30 a.m.

And that's where things stand right now. Thanks for your loyal readership, drop me a line or two, and keep on truckin'.