2008
WEEK EIGHT
Monday February 18th through Sunday February 24th
Monday starts out with me sitting in a rest area along I-90 on the west side of South Dakota. A quick glance through the windshield lets me know there is a fresh inch or two of snow on the ground. Considering the fact that the roads weren’t in the best of shape (covered with a very shinny coat of ice) when I stopped for the night, I wasn’t at all surprised by the worsened condition that I found the roads to be in this morning.
This not only means that I once again will have to contended with crappy road conditions, but now am looking at a time schedule that will be tested to the limit because things are going to be slow going on these road.
So I am looking at an 11hr drive day with one stop for fuel and maybe a stop or two of no more than 2-3 minutes. This must be done in order to fit in a 10hr break and drive the final 200 miles to the customer and make it there by 8:00am.
My Monday morning drive is anything but enjoyable. The roads are slippery and the going is slow. Once I make it to the fine state of Wyoming things just got worse. The roads were terrible and I felt more like an “Ice Road Trucker” than an OTR driver. I don’t know about the other drivers out here, but I sure am ready for this winter to be over with. I’ve already had more winter driving this year than normal and don’t see an end in sight. As a matter of fact, I’m very much annoyed when I start wandering if I’m going to have to deal with these roads all day long.
;
Three hours into it and I still don’t see an end to the snow and icy roads. There is an occasional car in the ditch, but not as many as you might think. The drivers up here seem to have more respect for the conditions and drive accordingly. Another 2 hrs down the road and some rather tense muscles bring me to the Wyoming POE. Nothing stops the DOT up here. This is a time when you don’t want to have a load that has you anywhere close to an #80,000 gross. Here’s what happens, you scale out somewhere down the road and you find yourself at #79,500 or so. Everything is good and your axel weights are legal. Well, then let’s say you drive on snow and ice packed road for a good 4 hours and them come across an open scale. Suddenly you find that your truck now weighs #82,000+ pounds and the scale master calls you in for a little chat. The result of that friendly conversation was evident by the two drivers that were crawling around under their trucks with hammers and knocking snow pack off of any surface possible.
Calk it up to another joy of winter driving.
Down the road I go again into more fun times. Over the next hour I come across two trucks sitting in the road. One was a three way Drive-Away rigging that just came to a dead stop in the middle of the right lane. He didn’t even make the slightest attempt to pull off onto the shoulder. It must have shut down without any notice to the driver. Sure is a bad day for something like that to happen. I got on the CB and let the trucks behind me know what lay ahead. Sure would have been nice if that Werner driver up ahead would have done the same for me.
The other lane blockage I came across was a CRST truck that had his tractor in the middle of the right lane and his tandems hanging off of the right shoulder. Not quit sure how he managed that one. The tractor usually hits the ditch first, but he managed to accomplish the opposite. At least he kept the thing upright.
Just as the frustration of the endless bad road was really starting to set in (I really wasn’t looking forward to these conditions in the Montana mountains), the weather began to break. Within another ½ hr I was looking at blue skies and dry roads. What a relief that was, it had been an exhausting morning and the carefree driving on dry pavement was a sourly need reprieve.
Due to the weather my time table was severely affected and I was only able to make one more stop for the day, and that was to get fuel. I was lucky and able to pull into the last unoccupied fuel island at a Pilot, fuel and be on my way in 6-7 minutes. This running 100% legal can really be a pain in the butt at times.
The rest of my day was spent driving across beautiful Montana and enjoying the view. Winter defiantly takes a toll on the scenery, but the snow capped mountains are enjoyable. Even if there isn’t all that much snow on them this year, especially on the east side of the state. The scenery improves greatly as you approach the west side. The end of my day finds me at a small truckstop featuring a McDonalds across the street for my dining experience (I think I’ll stick with ravioli tonight) and within 200 miles of my delivery in the morning. Looks like I will make my appointment time.
Wednesday has me rolling at 5am (my time) and headed north on Hwy93 toward Kalispell. For those of you that are not familiar with the area, Kalispell is just southwest of Glacier National Park and fairly close to the Canadian border. The scenery up there is phenomenal, and once again I find myself driving around in the dark with nothing but moonlight to show me the sights. I was really disappointed as I drove along Flathead Lake. The views were stunning, but the sun was just rising and there was not enough light to take a picture. What an absolutely gorgeous part of the country. Too bad its winter most of the year around here.
I was making descent time until I hit downtown Kalispell. My directions took me smack dap through the center of town (I don’t think there was an alternate) and endless lights and traffic (their version of rush hour). By the time I made it to the customer I was running about 15mins late, but after getting there I realized this was the least of my problems. As I started getting closer to my destination I began to develop doubts as to the validity of my directions. But these had to be right, the Qualcom directions were clear and my GPS lead me to the same place. The problem was that I found myself on a very narrow, thinly paved asphalt road and parked in front of an old, run down double wide trailer in a very rural area. “Oh Lord, how am I going to get out of this mess.”
A quick precursory assessment of the property led me to believe I was definitely not in the right place. There was a medium sized garage on the property, but no where close to being large enough to hold the entire load of insulation that I had, not to mention a quick peek through the window proved this was nothing more than a cluttered garage.
A previous call to the customer had resulted in an answering machine and subsequent calls were no more successful. I had left a message and my phone number, but nothing was getting results. I knew there was no point in contacting Crete, they would just be calling the same numbers. Well, it’s time to start pounding on the door of what I can only assume will be some unsuspecting and grumpy, recently awoken individual who happens to own a very large dog (prints in the snow around the property).
My repeated (and uncomfortable) knocking is finally answered by a portly gray bearded gentleman with a rather confused look on his face (and a very large dog at his side ,grrrrr). He opens the door and Mr. Big Dog comes out to investigate, “nice puppy”, and a pat on the top of the head. He turns out to be a sweetheart, the dog, not the tired, half asleep resident who wants to know why a stranger, in the middle of the Montana country side, is pounding on his door at this early hour. A short conversation ensues and I learn that this is the customer's father-in-law and although deliveries used to be made here long ago when it was a smaller business, deliveries are now being made at a different location. Good and bad here, at least I don’t have to make an impossible back into a residential driveway, but know I have to figure out how to get out of this neighborhood.
A few minutes later I am greeted by a young gentleman who instructs me to follow him to the new shop. After a tight turn or two and some concern about an overhead wire I find myself backing into their shop and the garage door being closed. There is no dock to back to, just 6 guys ready to go. I must say, they are a motivated bunch and have the entire trailer hand unloaded in less than 40 minutes.
Now it’s time to send in the MT call and I have a good idea of what to expect. On my way through town I was checking out the surroundings for a place to park (to my knowledge there were no truck stops in the area) and had spotted a vacant lot about 5 miles back. Since I was in a building when I sent in my MT call the single couldn’t get through, so I pulled out and headed for my preplanned hiding place. This should give dispatch time to respond. Yeah, right.
Once I pulled into the lot and after almost getting stuck in the 4 inches of snow that covered it (not much traction with and MT trailer), I shut down and grabbed by broom to sweep out the trailer. What I found did not sit well with me. Apparently in the resent past this trailer was loaded with what appeared to be medium sized barrels and one of them had leaked. This resulted in about 5% of the wood floor area being saturated with some kind of a vegetable oil. No concern if I was picking up a palletized load, but if I had a floor load down the road, there is little hope that a shipper will put their product in this trailer. There is nothing I can do about it here, it’s not something that can be washed out so I hope for the best and go back to the cab of the truck and wait for a load offer.
I am looking at a bad situation as far as my hours went. Ever since I had been stuck in Yakima I have been running long, nonstop days and now found myself with 9.75hrs available for the rest of today, tomorrow and the following day before I would be gaining any hours back. What this basically means is that whatever load I get, there must be enough time to fit in a 34hr reset because I’m not making a delivery from anywhere in that part of the world in less than 10 hrs.
Knowing that I am very tight on available hours and the fact that the computer will not take into account the 3+hrs I had already worked today I decided to send in a message instead of waiting for an offer that I wouldn’t be able to run that I would just have to refuse anyway. The message I sent was something to this effect, “Very short on hours, do you have something that picks up early on the 21st (it was now the 19th) so I can fit in a reset, or a load that picks up in the area with sufficient down time to reset”.
I realized that this message wouldn’t be read, or a least taken into consideration (because dispatch initially just sends out loads that the computer generates for them), but at least it is now in the Qualcom system in the event that I have problems in the future with dispatch when I have to start refusing loads. I was of course sent what seems to becoming the standard message of “Low on freight, check back in 3 hours”. I was not at all surprised by this and set about amusing myself. Even in the north country of Montana my Sprint card was working for me. Yeah!
The time went by quickly for me and when I sent in a load request I was almost immediately greeted with a load offer. Oh my God! They want me to go back to Seattle. “But I don’t want to go back to no load land!” All in all, it’s actually a good load as far as miles go but a quick look at the PU and Del times sooths my soul. There is no way I can do this load with my available hours. I once again inform dispatch of my hours restrictions and politely refuse the load. This is when you tend to get a more personalized response for dispatch. They actually have to put some thought into the next load offer. It didn’t take anymore than 10mins and I was offered another load along with a message, “How about this one”.
What I got was a load offer that was a live load 300 miles away anytime the next day and had an appointment delivery in Houston TX (1838mi) Saturday at 8am. The only way I can make that delivery appointment is if I do a 34reset. This wouldn’t be a problem if I could PU the load tonight and do a reset, or if I drove to a truckstop next to the shipper, did a reset and did my PU after. The problem is that if I PU the load on the scheduled day it would cut into the middle of my reset, therefore voiding the reset which would result in a late delivery. I spent a bit of time trying to make the hours work out but realize it can’t happen as scheduled. I was almost ready to refuse the load, realizing that I would basically have to tell dispatch to forget me while I do a reset where I’m at. That didn’t sound like a good idea because after my reset I would again be waiting for a load and I don’t have much confidence in finding loads in these part lately. With that in mind I accepted the load with the intentions of making some phone calls once I got the load information. If after that, I wasn’t able to make this load work I could always Tcall the load somewhere along the way and hopefully not get anyone riled up in the process.
Once the load info showed up I was ready to head over to the shipper. But because of the wonderful hours of service regulations and the fact that I had sat too long before getting this load offer I was in a position where I could not start driving at this time and have enough hours to make it to the shipper. I could however sit for an extra 4hrs, log it as sleeper berth time (I was in the sleeper berth the whole 8hrs, just not sleeping), take advantage of the extended sleeper birth provision, dive the 300 miles to the shipper by midnight (wouldn’t want to drive after my 14hrs and be there by 7:30pm, but it’s legal to sit around all day and then drive to midnight, or later if I wanted too), idiotic regulations.
Since I had 4hrs to burn sitting around I started making calls. The first call was to the consignee because the load information instructed me to call for directions and an ETA. This was extremely encouraging to me because according to the Qcomm I had an 8:00am Saturday del, but this had my thinking things could be changed. After talking to the customer and getting directions the subject of delivery time came up. He said they would be around all day Saturday and didn’t actually need the product until Monday (way too much sitting around, but it sure gives me some wiggle room, I’m going to be able to make this load work). I told him I would call tomorrow after finding out when the shipper could load me. So far so good.
My next call was to the shipper to find out what the loading schedule was for the plant. I was scheduled to PU anytime the next day. This led me to believe I could load anytime today or the day after. It turned out that they loaded 24hrs a day and said they could load me anytime, “just check in on the gate phone when you arrive”. I can’t believe my good luck on this one, everything is working out great.
Once my 8hrs are up I head on down the road, my intention is to get loaded tonight and do a 34hr reset at the truckstop that is about 2 miles away. It will be around midnight by the time I make it to the shipper and I would prefer to PU the load after my reset, but Crete would start asking questions because it would be a late PU as far as they were concerned, so tonight it is.
As I drive along Flathead Lake the sun is just setting behind the mountains and I find that I am unable to get a decent picture once again, just like this morning. I took a couple anyway.
Everything went as planed and I found myself to be the only truck on the property. The forklift operator looked like he was thankful to have something to do and within 15 of bumping the dock I was loaded and off to find a parking spot. One of the benefits of driving around in Montana this time of year is that the truckstops have plenty of parking, even in the middle of the night. I had contemplated getting a hotel room for the next two nights, but since it was so late I spent the night in the truck and drove across the road the next day and got a room for Wednesday night at the finest establishment in Three Forks, MT. Uuuuff!
Thursday found me in what has become a familiar situation of driving as far as I can, as fast as I can with as few stops as possible. Because of the way things have worked out (having to take an 8hr sleeper berth before driving to the shipper) I will not be able to have this load delivered by the original appointment time, but fortunately there was some unexpected flexibility on the receivers’ side. Even though they were open to a delivery time I wanted to have it there as early as possible to avoid any conflict with Crete and more importantly, the sooner I could get empty, the sooner I would be getting a load out. The big problem with that thought is that the hope of getting a load out of Houston in today’s freight climate on a Saturday afternoon may have been a tad bit optimistic.
I called the receiver and we settled on a delivery between noon and 1pm. I then sent a message to Crete dispatch, “I called customer as instructed for directions and ETA, delivery time has been rescheduled to 12:30”. OK, life is good. I’m ready to roll and my butt is covered. No late delivery, I didn’t have to sit any longer in Montana than my log book required and I got a nice 2100+mile run out of the deal. All I have to worry about is getting a load out of Houston when I’m empty.
My drive back across Wyoming went much better than the trip in. All of the horrible roads were now dry and most of the snow from just the other day was practically gone. I did come across on interesting sight on Thursday. This must have been a wild ride. From the look of things, this Arrow driver was west bound and must have fallen asleep. I could see his tire tracks where he drove through the median, then crossed the east bound lanes and then continued down one hell of a hill into a field before finally coming to a stop. Sure did an amazing job of keeping the thing upright.
Thursday night found me in a truckstop between Cheyenne and Denver and Friday was an uneventful day of driving that found me in nowhere Texas for the night.
Saturday had me looking at 400 more miles to my destination and I arrived at the customer at 12:30. The live unload was quick and my MT call was sent in.
I was not at all surprised by the response. As I had expected, no loads were available today or tomorrow. Looks like my second layover with Crete. This slow freight stuff is for the birds. What I received was a massage that read, “can you run this shag load, it pays $35 and I will get you a preplan for Monday morning.” Well, I didn’t have anything else to do and a preplan sure beats waiting until the next day or longer to have a load offered so I said yes, but after getting the load info I found that it didn’t deliver until 7PM and my 14hrs were up at 7:45. Way too tight of a schedule, so I sent a message to dispatch to let them know I couldn’t take this load as planned. After a number of messages back and fourth and a very honest effort on my part to get this load done it was decided by dispatch that they would get someone else to do it. He thanked me for the effort and sent me a 3 load offer. All loads were live loads that had early Monday morning appointments. I settled on one that picked up in Port Arthur, TX about 100mi away (I could drive over there today) and be set to get an early start on Monday morning. Once loaded I could run it up by Tulsa, OK(500mi) and drop it early in hopes of getting a load going west so I can take some hometime in Phoenix to visit the family.
I put the truck in gear and head over to the Petro just outside of Beaumont, find myself a parking spot and put in. I’m not at all crazy about another layover, but at least I ended up with decent miles for the week, I’m in a spot where there are a number of restaurants to choose from and there is a movie theater across the street. Looks like I’ll have time to catch up on some movies.
It turns out I’m not the only one who doesn’t have a load. I arrived at the Petro midday Saturday and find very few parking spaces available. Sunday was even more surprising to me. I took a walk around the lot around noon when most truckstops are closer to empty than not and there were almost no spaces available. Just a lot of trucks waiting for loads. I don’t think I like this slow economy thing.
WEEK EIGHT RESULTS
Monday February, 18th through Sunday February, 24th
Miles include deadhead
Wasta, SD to Kalispell, MT.................................822mi
Three Forks, MT to Houston, TX..........................2131mi
Houston, TX to Beaumont, TX.............................75mi
Total Paid Miles............................................. ....3028 miles
Actual Miles………………………3045
3028mi x .42 = $1271.76
