Better Late?

DATELINE: BILOXI, MS, 7:15 p.m. CST

My apologies, gang, for taking so long to get back to this blogging thing so you could follow along on this tour of duty. But I was taught growing up that if you can't say anything nice about someone/something, don't say anything at all. And that sums up how the past week-and-a-half has been, for the most part. Let me set the stage for ya'.

It all started on my first day back in the truck, Friday, 1/2. Mrs. R.T. drove me back in the morning. (Why is she always so willing to return me to my truck after my time at home?) I waited the usual 90 minutes for my first assignment, and it set the precedent for this time out. I was to pick up a loaded trailer there at the yard where I was, and take it to 2 deliveries, the first in Coldwater, MI, the second in Grove City, OH, just outside of Columbus. However, the delivery appointment for the Coldwater stop was at 6:00 p.m. that evening. The Grove City stop would be a drop-and-hook (D&H), but set for midnight. Since that company sticks to its appointments schedule (i.e., no early live-unload deliveries), I had to wait around for a few hours before setting out from Romulus for the 2-hour trek to Coldwater. Fortunately, there's a small truck stop 1/2 mile from that yard, so I zipped over there for access to better amenities during my wait.

So in these first 11 days of this tour I have had an ungodly amount of waiting around. Highlights:

Sat., 1/3
Day 2 of the tour, and I'm assigned a noon pickup in Lima, OH. I got to the company, gave them my pickup number, and they told me that load wasn't planned. Long story short, after over an hour of bickering w/ Dispatch (the weekend crew, of course), they finally figured out that the shipper had messed up and given USA the wrong pickup number, which they duly gave to me. The kicker: my real load wouldn't be ready for pickup 'til 6:00 p.m. So I had to drive over to a somewhat nearby (15 miles) truck stop to wait for the appointed hour. All the while, my 14-hour clock was ticking, so after making the pickup I wouldn't be able to drive very far towards the load's destination in Windsor Locks, CT. (I made it to Girard, OH, almost to the PA line.)

Sun, 1/4
No huge waiting problems that day, but a lot of driving. I finished the D&H delivery with about 2 hours left of my allotted 11 driving hours for the day, and my next pickup was about a mile away. I did have to wait about 15 minutes for the next place's shipping office to open up, but that wasn't bad, considering. It was a drop-and-hook pickup, but I did have to take some time to sweep out the empty trailer I was dropping off. I finished off the day at a rest area along I-84 in NY.

Mon, 1/5
Just a full day of driving, back across PA and OH en route to St. Peters. MO, just west-northwest of St. Louis. I ended up at another rest area, this time between Columbus and Dayton.

Tues, 1/6
This day started miserably with some nasty weather, freezing rain--the worst! So I got caught in a jam within my first few miles of the day. Fortunately, the temperature was right at freezing and slowly rising, so the roads de-iced and the jam cleared up fairly soon. But I still had to drive through fog and misty rain for quite a while, making it a somewhat stressful jaunt.

I made it to the delivery late that afternoon, dropped the load and hooked up and empty, then retreated to a nearby truck stop for the night.

Weds, 1/7
This is when things really start to get "good". My next pickup was originally scheduled for midnight Tuesday, but since that wouldn't work for me due to the DOT hours of service regulations, they rescheduled it to 3:30 a.m., which is when I could get there legally. So I woke up (unintentionally) at 1:30, putzed around for a while, then hit the road at 3:00 when I completed my 10-hour break. I should mention the pickup was at the big brewery in St. Louis. (No names here for customer confidentiality purposes, but you can guess who I mean.)

So I arrived there about 3:45, and was told that the load wasn't ready yet; it wasn't scheduled 'til 5:00. The company would pre-load a trailer and take it to their drop yard, where I would retrieve it when it was ready. In the meantime, I could park over by their drivers' lounge building and wait. (There's that verb again.) They have a phone system for checking the status of loads by pickup number, so I checked that periodically. (It frequently gave a busy signal when I dialed in, to boot!) After a couple of routine checks, the message changed and said the that the load wouldn't be ready 'til 11:00. Sheesh! Further waiting. So I stretched out and napped for a bit.

Around 11:00 I checked in again. NOW the message said the load wouldn't be ready until 10:00 p.m.! OK, who allows this sort of behavior on the part of shippers? Besides, I wasn't the only driver waiting many hours. One other USA driver--who would be taking his load to the same destination as I, Beaumont, TX--wound up being there long enough to complete a 34-hour restart. Anyway, to wrap up this saga, the load didn't get finished 'til after midnight, and I just stayed there to get more sleep to get rested up for the long drive the next day. I got up, grabbed the load, and got started at 4:00 a.m. the next morning.

Thurs, 1/8
Just drive, drive, drive. I was planning to make it to our terminal in Shreveport, LA, but en route I got a message from the company's maintenance department that they wanted me to stop at a truck stop in Benton, AR to get my truck serviced. I had already passed that one when I got the message, but I was taking a quick break at the TA in Prescott, AR, which has a repair shop, so maintenance had me get the work done there. Since it was getting late in the day, Shreveport was out.

(I still haven't spent a night there yet, though I've stopped by for fuel a couple of times. I was planning to sit in one of the big, leather recliners in Shreveport's drivers' lounge and watch the NCAA Football National Championship game on the big-screen TV, but that idea went out the window. And the Prescott TA's drivers' lounge TV was on the fritz, too, so goodbye football game. See what happens when I make plans? Grrrr!)

Anyway, back to the truck maintenance. The job was for them to lube the tractor and trailer, change a couple of filters, and do an inspection of the trailer. Well, in the inspection the tech found 3 bad tires. Yada yada, check w/ USA for authorization to replace the tires, etc, etc, the whole thing took 6 HOURS! (Did I mention I've been doing a lot of waiting this time around? Ritzin', fritzin', #!@$**^#$)

Fri, 1/9
Back on the road, good 'n early to get to Beaumont by 11:00. Made it, the live-unload went relatively quickly, and I headed over to a Petro truck stop just a couple miles down the highway. It took quite a while--several hours, of course--for my next assignment to come in, and it didn't please me. My next pickup was also in Beaumont, only about a mile from the Petro where I was parked, but not 'til Monday morning. Now, I don't have shower credits at the Petro chain, so if I was gonna be idle for 2 days, I needed to get somewhere where I didn't have to pay $10 to clean up. So I decided to just stay there the rest of the night and move to a Pilot in Orange, TX, just 25 miles east, on Saturday.

Sat, 1/10
I'll just gloss over the part where I got caught in some rain walking back to my truck after breakfasting down the block from the truck stop. The part of Saturday's story that fits the theme is the traffic jam during the 25-mile schlep from Beaumont to Orange. The mid-point of the stretch is currently a construction zone, a two-lane concrete chute that narrows at one point to a single lane. Making the drive in the early afternoon, what should have been a 30-minute trip took over 1-1/2 hours!

Sun, 1/11
Nothing to go with this week's theme, except, of course, that I was sitting still and not driving paying miles. But I got a 34-hour restart out of the deal, so I have fresh 70 work hours available for the next 8 days.

Today
I got up at 5:00, hit the road at 5:30, getting back to Beaumont and the shipper at 6:00. My appointment was for 7:00, so I had left Orange early just in case of another traffic jam in that construction zone. Nope, sailed right through. However, the shipper didn't even open up 'till 8:00, so there was another wasted 2 hours. And while waiting, the place filled up with trucks. 5 other USA Trucks and several others from other companies. But I was loaded and out of there by 9:15.

Before I hit the road this morning, I noticed that one of my headlights was burned out, so Maintenance instructed me to stop by the Beaumont Petro after picking up my load to get it replaced. So I did, and that took over an hour as well. (The wait for authorization from USA through the automated system they use took MUCH longer than the actual repair.) Afterwards I just hustled as much as I could to get in as many miles as I could before today's 14-hour clock ran out. (I started at 5:15 a.m., so I had to stop by 7:15 p.m.) I made it here to a Pilot outside of Biloxi. I'm on my way to a Wednesday morning delivery in Hanahan, SC (outside of Charleston), so tomorrow I'll need to book about 600 miles.

And now you're caught up with me. Whew! Again, I apologize for my absence from the airwaves, but with long, stressful days I haven't been in the right frame of mind to re-live them in writing for you. Thanks for your patience and patronage, send me some witty rejoinders, and keep on truckin'.