Back Towards the Northeast

DATELINE: JESSUP, MD, 6:45 p.m. EDT

Miles Today: 481

Another long day--11.5 hours of work (10.25 driving + 1.25 "on-duty/not driving" hours) over an elapsed 13.5 hours. The day's mileage is down beacuse the lion's share of my diving today was along US highway 29, with all of the in-town slowdowns and stoplights en route. But let me recap my day and my current load.

I got up at 3:30 this morning, got cleaned up, and hit the road at 4:15. It took me 2-1/4 hours to reach my delivery customer in Randleman, NC, and it didn't do me any good getting there 1/2-hour early. First of all, another USA driver was already there (he also had a 7:00 appointment), and he was docked in the one door the company uses to unload the product we brought in (rolls of paper). Secondly, the company isn't a 24/7 operation, and they didn't start work 'til 7:00. So I had an hour-long wait before I could dock and get unloaded. But I didn't mind that too much.

Once that delivery was complete, my next assignment was to zip up to the town of Brown Summit, NC, a trip I completed within an hour. The load I picked up there ('twas a drop-and-hook pickup) is due in Lumberton, NJ tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 7:00. So from the time I left the pickup, I have 21 hours to make the 429-mile drive and include the required 10-hour break. Despite a rush-hour slowdown circling Washington, DC, I'm on target to get to the delivery on time. Of course, with 132 miles yet to go from here (according to Mapquest), I do still need to get rolling early in the morning again.

Except for the first 30-ish miles in NC, this trip is completely along the route I took with my load to Maine a couple weeks ago: US-29 north to east I-66 to I-495 around DC's northwest corner to I-95 north. So it's familiar territory. Funny, I'd been on this job for over a year-and-a-half without ever needing to use "29", and this is my 4th trip on it in the last couple of months. (US-29 bisects VA from Danville in the south-central part of the state to the DC area.)

Now let me vamp on a big change the company has imposed on its drivers. Recently the company issued a new fuel network booklet (list of authorized places we can stop to fuel up our trucks). The new network is almost exclusively Pilot Travel Centers. Gone are ALL of the Flying Js and Petros and most of the TAs. What that means is I won't be able to earn shower credits at those places (one earns a shower by buying 50 or more gallons of fuel and swiping his/her loyalty card for that chain). I can still park at Js, Petros, and TAs, but I won't be able to shower there in the mornings before starting work. (Well, to be accurate, I could BUY showers, but at $10 a pop, that's not an attractive option.)

Of course, I do earn shower credits at Pilots when I fill up there, but Pilots are lower on my preference list for overnight parking because:
1. They generally have smaller, tighter parking lots, and
2. They don't have drivers' TV lounges a la Flying Js, TAs, and Petros.
On the other hand, USA Truck has an arrangement with Pilot where we earn double "Payback Points" on our loyalty cards for each fuel purchase. We can then redeem our points at the fast food outlets--Wendy's, Arby's, Subway, among others--in many of the Pilot locations. I did that today for a free meal (each point = 1 cent towards the purchase) at the Arby's in the Danville, VA Pilot.

Now on to answer a couple of questions posed by reader andy's kids:
1) What's the truth about truckers, gallon jugs, and rest stops?
Why, I have no idea what you're talking about. Whatever do you mean?

2) If you pass a school bus or station wagon full of kids giving the honk-your-horn signal, what do you do?
I just ignore 'em. Honking is supposed to be saved for appropriate traffic situations. Don't want to confuse or alarm the motoring public with unnecessary horn blasts. Besides, my new truck doesn't even have an overhead cable for honking the air horn; it just has a button on the steering wheel instead.

Well, as I mentioned above, tomorrow's gonna be yet another early start, so it's once again time to wrap this up. Remember, I love getting comments from my loyal readership, so let me have 'em. Thanks for checking in today, and keep on truckin'.