sittin & waitin......

most people think all truck drivers do is run down the highways of america taking things from one place to another......and that is a good part of our job.....it's the part that usually makes sense and earns us a paycheck......but it surely isn't all that we do.......on some loads, just the paperwork involved, alone, could send the hardiest of pencil pushers into a frenzy.....and then there's the driver's who load and unload their own freight......we try to avoid those kinds of loads.....occasionally we'll get stuck with one and i always argue with them over it since i have a strong aversion to touching freight.....it's not that i'm lazy....well, not entirely that i'm lazy, it's just that while i drove 500 miles thru the nite hauling said freight, i never once looked over and seen a shipper or receiver sittin in the passenger seat telling me funny stories to help keep me awake.......they never fuel, they have never once come out and cleaned my mirrors.....nothin........so i take great offense when they think i should work on their dock......just doesn't happen very often and i can assure you, NEVER without protest!!.....

anyway, the other big part of truck driving is the sitting-and-waiting........the past couple of weeks we've been doing alot of that.....first off because our load got picked up by another truck....then an entire week in a hotel with our truck in the shop.......then another day & a half waiting on a shipper to rework a load that was too heavy on the front....TWICE.....they reworked it and still couldn't get it right.......i mean, jeesh, it's not like they load trailers everyday..(insert sarcastic eye roll here)...........we didn't sit & wait much for the next few days, as we came down from seattle to los angeles, delivered, picked up another load and headed to baltimore......three days comin across the country meant three days that they had to get everything worked out on this load......three days till our 0700 delivery appointment this morning that i got up at 0300 in order to make on time......just to be turned away from the port gates because someone had not bothered to register this truck at the port for the past three days.......hmmmmmm.....can we say "incompetence"???????.......

so now it's 1645 eastern time and i'm still hooked to the same load and still waiting for them to tell us where to take it.......we are supposed to be headed home as soon as we do drop it.......i can assure you i won't be sittin & waiting for them to tell me to go!

theives among us!

everybody has fears.....we all are afraid of something.....for truck drivers, it's usually nasty winter road conditions, drive tire blowouts or that mini-van loaded with kids that pulls out in front of you........for alot of us it's knowing that things "back home" are safe and secure while you're out here earning a living........today we know how that feels......we're in portland, oregon in a hotel while our truck is in the shop........brad and i, while spiritual people, are not church-goers, so we don't tithe, but are thinking maybe we should start after these past few days......it all started last friday.....we delivered here in portland and were dispatched to pick up a load here later that evening going to sacramento, but when we went to pickup, it had already been gotten by another truck....evidently the load was double-dispatched, which i never understand how that happens, but it occasionally does.......so we headed over to the truck stop and called it a nite.....then on saturday evening we were again dispatched on a load going, this time, to los angeles,but it didn't pick up till monday morning.....that meant we had all day sunday off.....we are never ones to mind an occasional day of sitting idle because even tho you're not making any money, you do get a chance to catch up on sleep, laundry, truck chores and, let's be honest, facebook!!......we walked over to a really nice little restaurant for supper sunday nite and had marion berry pie for dessert!....if you haven't had marion berry pie then you need to add that to your bucket list......alot like blackberries, marion berries are indigenous to this area and very very tasty.....i wish i'd remembered my camera, just so that i could make your mouth water, but you'll just have to take my word for it......yummo!!.......anyway, we returned to the truck, watched a little tv and settled in for the nite......all was going well till about 0300 local time when we were awakened by what we thought must surely be the second coming....light on the dash blinking, buzzers going off....and a truck full of exhaust fumes!!!!!......we quickly got up, got the truck shut off and opened up and brad got under the hood to see what was going on......we ended up taking the truck to another truckstop shop where the mechanic found a break in the exhaust line just under the bunk......he couldn't fix it, so we took it to the international dealer's shop where they found a host of troubles in addition to the exhaust leak......seeing that some of the parts needed had to come to portland from the chicago area, they found us a nice hotel room....and we settled in again and ordered pizza, since after spending all day in their lovely, but hardly air conditioned driver's lounge, neither one of us were interested in leaving the a/c of our nice room......this morning brad called to check on the truck and was told that it wouldn't be ready today either.....frustrating, but doable....it's just part of truckdriving........a little later in the morning tho was when insult was added to injury......we got a call from the guy who looks after things for us while we're gone......he'd gone by our house this morning and found that sometime in the past few days it had been broken into!!!!.......in all the years we've been on the road, we've always worried about this happening, but have never had anything bothered.....it probably took me a good ten minutes of the call to comprehend that he wasn't bs'n me and that someone had actually been in our home.........i still don't think it became totally real to me till he put the state trooper on the line to talk to me......hearing news like that is just surreal........it appears they'd entered thru a window.....they must have spent a little time there, because every drawer had been opened and gone thru......they took some change we had in plastic jars where we empty our pockets on the truck and hadn't gotten taken to the bank yet....the took some of brad's marilyn monroe wines.....they took some jewelry .....these are the things we know of so far....we won't really know what's missing until we can get home and look for ourselves.........the biggest thing is that they took any peace of mind that we had, naively or otherwise, about the house and they put a large crimp in any thread of belief in human decency......no one should ever have to worry about the safety of the things they've worked hard to provide for, but today is totally about us.....so i'm saying that truckdrivers should never have to worry that, while they're working to bring the stuff you want to you, that their stuff is being pilfered out the back door!

sh*t our load planner comes up with!

i know that some of you just shake your head when you read some of my blogs where i complain about the folks we work for.......i know you think i should just suck it up and get on with it.....pull up my big girl panties and deal.......well, most of the time i do.......i'm a dealer-with-er-kind of person, always preferring to see the glass as half-full............it's just that sometimes it harder than others to believe there's any substance in the glass at all......

take last nite for example.....we delivered our load in salt lake city yesterday morning and then headed over to the truck stop, caught up a little on sleep, got a nice shower, some supper.....spent the evening watching tv and catching up on facebook till the driver-tech beeped with our assisgnment and this is what we found.........take a close look......deadheading 647 miles from salt lake to our company yard in colton, california, just to run a load over to ontario, ca....a whopping 21 miles away!!!!.......it doesn't take an mba to calculate the business stupidity of this logic........and if you notice that the load needed to deliver by 0900 local time the next morning.....now what you can't see in the picture is that this pre-assignment didn't even come to us till midnite!......we've been doing alot of loads lately that have high dead-head miles on them....this doesn't usually matter to us since we get paid by the mile loaded or empty....but sometimes ya just gotta go "whoooaaaaaa!!!".......anyway....brad called our fleet manager, explained that there was no way we could make it on time, the fleet manager, surprisingly, agreed how ridiculous this load was when there were surely any number of drivers in the local california area who could take it and he had it taken off of us..........as it stands now, we are picking up a load right here in salt lake in a couple of hours and heading to portland, oregon....makes much more sense to me.....with over 6000 trucks in the fleet there is hardly any area of the country that there aren't some of our trucks in at any given time.....why would you not utilize the closest truck????.....i've been reading a hilarious non-fiction book by justin halpern entitiled "sh*t my dad says"......i think i may have to plagerize his title and start a blog, "sh*t my load planner comes up with!"

something old....something new.....

hah!....i had you!.....you thought i was announcing a wedding, huh????......well, that could get a little complicated if it were true since brad gets cranky if i mention getting any other husbands besides him.....although he has agreed that i could have a brief dalliance with sean connery, if the moment ever presents itself...............actually i was thinking more about some fellow drivers we ran into earlier this week while we were in seattle.......when we arrived at the shipper's there were a few other trucks from our company there and since there was a delay with getting the freight off incoming ships and thru customs, we ended up spending one entire day and part of the next there waiting to get loaded......that gives you a little time to get to know the other drivers and listen to their war stories........if you're a fast enough talker, it even gives you a little time to tell a few of your own........

we spent alot of time talking with two trucks in particular.....one a team of "seasoned" drivers who, from the content of their stories, had literally done just about "everything" there was to be done in life, both in the trucking industry and out of it......we stood in amazement at the level of bullcrap that clogged up the arteries of their tales ....you know the kind i'm talking about.....the ones you hear when you have to sit at the "professional drivers only" counter in the truckstop restaurant because all the other booths and tables are taken......since they'd already given us their ages, we also may have missed details of their stories, since we were both busy in our heads trying to calculate how you could possibly fit all those accomplishments and adventures into the span of life they'd been on this earth......from years of experience, we'd learned that it's easier to just "ah ha" in the appropriate places during these kinds of tales tho, than to call the storyteller on the bullcrap and make him have to try to show his cards......it isn't that they weren't likable enough.....just that you need a big shovel to hang around with these guys very long........

the "something new" was a young couple who were literally on their third trip out......they'd just come out on the road together after having went thru school and then a few weeks running with individual trainers and they were eager to soak up any advice and experience we could share with them to make both their jobs and their life on the road easier.....brad and i both were impressed immediately at how down to earth and level headed they both were.....i was also impressed that while watching their faces during bullcrap stories, i could see that they weren't buying into any of it....that made me feel alot better....i've heard some real horror stories about new drivers who think they can put into practice some of the tall tales they've heard from other drivers.......they asked alot of questions, even took some notes and already had a couple stories of their own to tell.....we ended up trading phone numbers, email, etc......and came away feeling confident that they were on the right path to a successful driving career....

it made brad and i feel a little honored to get to mentor this young couple.......we wish both teams all the best....storytelling, like truckdriving, can be hard work!

wildhorse casnio......pendleton, oregon

after running over 7000 miles in 7 days, we finally got a load that gives us a little down time over the weekend.....we're hauling 42,000 lbs. of sugar from nampa, idaho to a bakery in seattle and we don't have to be there till monday morning......when we got this load we really expected the drivertech to beep and tell us to load it and drop it at the yard for a solo driver to deliver and then that would be followed by another beep giving us a long and "hot" load that just had to go, go!, go!!.....but so far that's not happened......it took us about 5 hours yesterday at the shipper's to get loaded...they're usually not that slow there but for some reason everything was moving slowly....it was refreshing to scale out legal on the first try and not have to do alot of sliding tandems to get things road-ready.......so since we hadn't ate all day and since it was already late evening by eastern standards, we went over to the truckstop and had supper and called it a nite........we've been watching the first two seasons of "weeds"......(yes, i know, we're behind!...sometimes it takes us awhile to embrace new pop culture.....lol).....anyway, we finished up season 2.....this show cracks me up......i swear, nancy (mary louise parker's character) cannot catch a break.....never mind that she's a marijuana dealer.....she's is the epitome of murphy's law and then some!!....anyway, now we're anxious to get to target for the rest of the seasons that are out on dvd.....that's pretty much how we watch tv.....seasons of the shows we like on dvd long after the next season of those shows have started.....we are never setting still long enough to catch anything in real time.....although lately we have been exploring hulu.com....a wonderful invention!!......any way, back to the sugar load.....we made it as far as pendleton, oregon......it was absolutely beautiful today coming over cabbage....the sky so clear you could see for miles....we decided to call it a night here.....pulled into the arrowhead travel plaza and cleaned out the truck......i think we have gremlins that trash this truck when we're not looking, because it sure does get dirty quick.....course it could be blamed on the fact that i had an snack attack of peanuts in the shell the other night while driving.....trust me, you cannot shell peanuts and drive at the same time and stay neat.....not to mention that had a cop saw me he would have probably explained how that isn't much different than driving while texting, so i have decided that peanuts in the shell is not a good "driving" snack......it could also be blamed on the pup, who loves nothing better than to get hold of a paper towel or tissue and see how many pieces she can transform it into!.......after dusting and running the sweeper and cleaning the windows, we went inside to one of the nicest showers you can find in a truckstop....it was so cute i was sorry i hadn't thought to take my camera inside with me so that i could show you......clean and cool and really great water pressure!........right beside the truckstop is the wildhorse resort & casino.....doesn't take much more than that to put a sparkle in brad's eyes....lol...so we moved from the truckstop up to the casino truck parking area and ran inside......after all, farewell bend and cabbage scales were both closed today as we came over, so that's a sure sign that lady luck is in your house, right????......anyway, brad hit the three card poker table and i found a couple of good one armed bandits and then after awhile he found me and we hit the buffet......not the best one i've ever visited, but not bad........with my tummy full, i played a little while longer while he went back to the tables and then i decided babygirl was probably gettin lonely in the truck all by herself, so i called it an evening and came out to be with her......alot cooler.....not to mention cheaper, to play computer games out here with her......lol..........

pulled from the files of " you just can't make this crap up!"

in honor of father's day, here's another short installment from the "you just can't make this crap up!" file......

spotted this near ft. collins, colorado.....it actually was a pretty neatly done paint job.....considering all the time it must have taken tho, you have to ask yourself, "why?"

also in ft. collins.......i think the folks out there either get some kind of kickback on the price of paint or else just enjoy the fumes from it........

i can't think of a thing i could say that would explain this one any better.......

i guess if you're gonna be trailer trash, then be the cutest little trailer trash you can be.......

carl hayden dam at lake powell, az

we picked up a heavy load of sugar in nampa, idaho just before the memorial day weekend and took it down to pheonix, arizona.....i was already a little cranky because i had wanted to be home in west virginia over the holiday, but they offered us a nice bonus to stay out and run and even tho that brightened my mood a little, i was cranky all over again when i looked at the routing.....i84 down to ogden, ut, then i15 to down below salt lake city and then we were taking us89 out thru the woods ( as truckers like to say anytime they get off the 4 lane).....i'd never been down that way before and i just thought i wasn't in the mood to be dealin with draggin 45,000 lbs of sugar up one mountain after another.....i should have known better!.....it's true, there were alot of mountains......long pulls up and slow decensts.....but the mountains were absolutely beautiful and the small towns we went thru made me want to stop and spend at least a day in each one of them.....panquitch, utah.....kanab, utah...well, we did spend the night in kanab......and then we crossed over into arizona the next morning and found this little jewel.....pretty much the most northern tip of the grand canyon and beautiful in it's own right.....lake powell, just north of page, arizona....and the carl hayden dam and visitor's center.

if you enlarge the photo, you can see the dinosaur's prints pretty clearly.

you'd think i'd know by now that just as you can't judge a book by it's cover, you can't judge a trip by it's routing. if you find yourself ridin down this way, prepare to not be cranky anymore!