So, we headed to Georgia and we had a nice easy run.  We had a set appointment for 7 am to get unloaded and we had about eight extra hours.  So we timed the run to stop at Nick’s BBQ in Carlisle Arkansas.  Good BBQ with awesome service and they have truck parking.  About fifteen miles away we see a post on Facebook from Mark and Linda, a couple who follow this blog and have been driving for USX for a while now.  We had talked on the phone and emailed back and forth but never met.  They are at Nick’s.  I call and tell Mark we are 15 minutes away.  It was great to meet them and after a great lunch we were off to Georgia.    Got unloaded and headed up to North Cove NC to pick up a load back to Los Angeles.  We get there and then the fun begins.  We are picking up a load of medical supplies and so they need a refrigerated trailer as it cannot get to hot.  The shipper says our trailer is not loaded yet because it had not been cleaned.  We dropped our trailer and grabbed the dirty trailer, ran it across the street to a little truck stop and got it washed out, took it back over, gave it to the shipper and headed back across the street to wait for it to be loaded.  And we waited.  We then got a message on the truck computer with a new pre-plan picking up NOW 200 miles away.  No other information, our current load not canceled.  We sent a message asking what we were supposed to do, no response, sent another message, no response.  Tried to call, cannot get through to our fleet manager, tried again, on hold for 45 minutes and disconnected.  Sent another  message, got a response “Did you get that trailer washed out”?  This was not an answer to any of our questions.  I responded “Yes, a couple of hours ago and shipper has the trailer, what do you want us to do?”  No response, tried to call and found out our fleet manager is now gone for the day.  Still no instructions and our current load has now been ready for us to pick up for over an hour.  I said “screw it, we have a load” and went across the street and picked up our load.  We were just about at our maximum load so we had to manage our fuel level all the way across the country to make sure we did not fill the tanks just before we hit a weigh station.  The truck holds about 1500 pounds of fuel.  Then I started getting call after call from different fleet managers and load planners asking me to verify our load info.  It seems the shipper had screwed up a number of loads and all the other drivers had wrong loads.  It turns out we had the right load so after the third time I gave them the information, they finally believed me that we were good.  We got to Los Angeles, made our delivery and got a load to Denver and HOME.  We had two days to get there so I called the consignee and they told us they opened at 7 AM and would be happy to take the load a day early.  We were home on Thursday by 10:00 AM.  We had a great five days just hanging with the kids, attending the Rocky Mountain Showdown where Colorado State beat Colorado.  My son is a redshirting his Freshman year for CSU and is their quarterback of the future.  What a blast and we saw some old friends of mine at the game.  Funny when there are 60,000 people and you run into friends.

We headed out on Tuesday morning and after making a short delivery to WalMart we headed down to Denver to meet a solo driver who could not get to LA on time.  We are in Ontario CA, just got the oil change and periodic maintenance done on the truck, hanging in a hotel until tomorrow morning and we are heading up to near Monterey Bay. Sounds like another strawberry run to the East Coast.

Our next time off is in a couple of weeks when we are heading to Oshkosh Wisconsin for my Niece’s wedding.