OK, we have been running hard for the last week so let me try to catch everyone up.  After our delivery in Hayward there was nowhere to park.  We were sitting at the curb near the consignee’s waiting for a load assignment.  I was on the phone with my friend Shannon and she looked online and found a truck stop in Oakland, so we fired up the truck and headed over there (about 10 miles)  I will go ahead and call it a truck stop because the name included the words “Truck Stop”.  It was a joke and their parking was on the road.

The grand Oakland "Truck Stop"

This was right behind the Oakland Colosseum and NOT in a good area.  Anne sent a message to our fleet manager saying “It is scary here, we need to get to a truck stop”  He replied with “Get Going”  It was 57 miles to the nearest real truck stop near Modesto so we went there.  Nice warm day, we had showers and lunch and then got a message “No freight in the Bay Area, head to the Terminal in Colton”  That is our terminal in Southern California near Ontario.  We drove down and made some new friends, got our laundry done and a good nights sleep.  At 5:00 AM we got a load assignment from Long Beach California to New Jersey.  This was going to screw up our home time which was supposed to start on Friday but we accepted the load and got rolling.  It was a High Value Product load which meant that we had to have one person in the truck at all times and there were a ton of restrictions on where we could stop.  We ran through CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, KS, MO and Illinois.

As we were crossing the bridge from St Louis to East St Louis Anne’s phone rings and it is our Fleet Manager.  Did we get the repower?  Nope…just then the computer dings.  We are to head 100 miles North to Springfield IL and meet another team who we will swap loads with.  They have a load going to Denver.  HOME TIME!!!  We grabbed the load from a very interesting team who hated each other.  It was a man and woman, they were not a couple and really did not know each other very well.  They both were rolling their eyes all the time behind each others back.  I cannot imagine that situation.  We got out of their quickly. 🙂

We ran through the night and made the delivery at 8:00 AM today.  We then ran to the USX drop yard in Denver and dropped our trailer and then, after talking to our service department about a number of small problems with the truck, they wanted us to stop by the Freightliner dealer and have them look at it.  It is now 3:45 in the afternoon and they are still working on the truck.  Also, we walked across the street for lunch and Anne badly twisted her knee.  I now have a very whiny (but cute) wife who just wants to go home.