We are
sitting in a motel room in Phoenix, AZ. It is 9:30am and it is 110 degrees
outside. Thank God for air conditioning.
If all
goes as planned, we will be leaving Phoenix later today with a nice light
load of Styrofoam products to be delivered in Auburn, WA on Saturday night.
This SHOULD be our FINAL training run!!! Our stinky trainer (he only showers
and brushes his teeth every three days or so) is driving us insane and
we want our own truck… NOW!
If we
pass our road test on Monday, we should be reunited with the Wondermutt
by the end of the week and enjoying four or five well-deserved days off.
In our first month on the road we have traveled over 15,000 miles and driven
through 31 states. Not too bad for a couple of rookies.
Our favorite
run has been without a doubt a load of books we took from Amazon.com in
Reno, NV to Random House in Fredrick, MD. When we got to Random House,
we were sent to an area in the warehouse that contained about two dozen
giant bins overflowing with books. “Take as many of these as you can carry”,
said the kindly receiving clerk. “Excuse me?” I said. I didn’t quite understand.
“All of these books are to be destroyed, so feel free to take any that
you like” Holy Cow! It was the mother lode!
These bins
were full of current, top-selling hardbacks. I couldn’t believe that they
were to be destroyed. Well, we didn’t have to be asked twice. Christine
and I dove into the piles and started grabbing treasures with our greedy
little hands. When we finally emerged with our ink-stained fingers we had
about $300.00 worth of books to take back on the road.
Apparently,
when books are overprinted, many of them are just sent back to the publisher,
who sadly enough, just shreds
them.
Our worst
run has probably been the one we just finished. We took a load of car batteries
(HazMat) from Pennsylvania to here in Phoenix. HazMat is a pain! You have
to put all your placards on. You have to stop at all railroad crossings.
You have to stop every two hours and check your tires and your load and
worst of all, you have to stop at ALL weigh stations. Our company has these
neat little units in the trucks called “pre-pass”. It is a little black
box on your dash that communicates with the weigh stations as you
approach them.
The station
is able to check on all your licensing and records without having you stop
and very often you get the little green light while you are a mile from
the station and you just get to zoom on by while all the
other
trucks are pulling over. It feels great! Unfortunately, with a HazMat load,
you have to stop even if you get the green light. Bummer!
Another
big problem is that we were constantly being detoured off of the route
we were supposed to take. When there was construction or something, they
would make all the HazMat trucks go a different route. One time we had
to get off of a turn pike and there were no signs telling us how or when
to get back on. We pulled over and asked the trooper at the tollbooth what
to do. He gruffly stated that WE were the drivers and it was up to us to
figure out how to go around. Thanks officer! Our
atlases
only show low clearance and restrictions for highways and freeways and
this detour dumped us out right onto an unmarked street.
The computer
mapping program really came in handy there and we figured out our way back
to the turnpike. It is not very fun driving when you are looking
at every tree and wire and trying to figure out if it is at least 14 feet
tall and will clear the top of your truck.
Remember…
“Happiness
is a light load and a dry road!”
Aloha,
Rick
