Thanks, Steve. To tell you the truth, I think my main hesitation is that I will be giving up driving for the most part. It will be next to impossible to drive and dispatch several drivers. Of course, I haven't been doing much driving lately, anyway. I also need to decide on what I will charge. The best I can do out of Merrimack is $10/mile to Union City, CA. :wink:

If I can get that in the back of my F-350 I'll take it! :lol: I need the work right now. My honeydo list is getting longer by the minute. :shock:

I would love to be able to get those rates. If fuel keeps going up we may need rates that high to make a profit.

Rates are in the sh!tter house right now. My gross for the 2 1/2 weeks i was out was 14500 on 10280 miles. Thats 1.38 and included 3 major deadheads like the one from Miami i did on Wensday to my home in Charlotte...

It will take an extra effort to find good payings freight and its not easy, even for someone with so much expirience. It takes years for the economy to reach its 04 levels. I see thisa situation progress well into the 09 + ...

You're darn right it's not easy. It's nothing to spend 2 days and 50+ phone calls to *maybe* find one load that pays $2 on 500 miles. It takes longer to find the load than t does to pull it. Hard to dispatch under those circumstances.

Got your stickers yet Steve?

This has been a strange week. Rates have really been down in many parts of the country, but I had 3 loads offered to me that are higher than I have had in some time. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take any of them since I had to stay home with my wife. :sad: BUMMER!!

I'm assuming my stickers are at home Rank. I ordered them a while ago. I'm not sure if my cab card needs to be updated with Canada but will check on that when I go home. I need to have Alaska put on also.

Man that's a long deadhead. Just out of curiousity you must have been offered something in at least the $1.40 range out of Jacksonville at least. Stuff like this makes me nervous.

Jacksonville you say..

My friend..

That particular Wensday, Florida state had only 1 load posted the whole day.

From Monday when i delivered there they had only 1 that popped up in Miami, it was gone at .80cpm before it even hit the board. I waited till Tuesday but nothing. Wendsday i woke up, checked it out, nothing again and I just fired it up, came home that night. It was interesting to expirience the fact that I wasnt even able to load on the way home. I had one load out of Charleston to Charlotte but it canceled...

PS
There aint no 1.40 freight down there unless you run intrastate !!!!

Do you run reefer? I don't know I'm so new at this but when I was with that guy I was with he could get me out of Miami for around $1.35- $1.40 but I didn't think it was so great has it was these long drawn out routes to bad areas with the reefer running all the time.

However I've been looking around since I've been home and seems like there are a lot of produce shippers or middlemen around here. I always wondered why there is no freight coming out of here if Florida is the gateway to Latin America and all the produce down there. Now they are talking about expanding the port in Ft. Lauderdale.

Come to find out there are large produce warehouses all around me; even a building I've driven past 1,000 times that I never paid attention to had a sign that it was a tomatoe place that had now moved 15 minutes up the road.

I went over to the State Farmers Market the other day and seemed like a lot of stuff going on. And today I called a broker and got a load out to the Midwest for about $1.30 a mile. (I booked early and am hoping to hell it doesn't get cancelled.). And to be honest I asked for more after she told me the rate.

And then as I wrote earlier I called a shipper direct and seemed like he was going to give me a load. Mind you I checked the load boards and there was nothing but I don't think the loads down here make it to the boards.

Like I said reading that someone needs deadhead out to North Carolina scares the hell out of me as I live here and can't avoid coming back. To be honest I was thinking of parking the truck up by you (my brother lives just outside of Charlotte) and flying back home if I was going to have trouble getting out of here.