Rambling On

It has been a pretty eventful summer. Not long after my last post, Mike's mother passed away. We took a week off in Evansville, IN for her funeral. About two weeks later we got a load to Chicago and were able to take a weekend off, so Mike got to visit with an uncle of his that he hadn't seen in 40 years. He also got to visit with another cousin in Arkansas. We just got back on the road from spending a few days in Alabama with my family. We've done a lot of catching up and re-connecting this year.

We've also had a few exciting moments out here on the road. We got buzzed by a B-1 Stealth Bomber out in West Texas. It was flying sow low I could just about see the grin on the pilots face. I drove through a dust storm in New Mexico, nearly got blown off the road. We had a driver for another company try to claim we hit his truck up in New Jersey, it was obvious that the damage on his bright orange truck was from him jack-knifing into his own trailer. He was just looking for someone else to blame it on. We had to call out the police to get that all sorted out.

We've seen a lot of accidents, including a car that ran off the road and rolled right in front of us (the driver was unhurt), and been stuck in a lot of backups. Construction is pretty thick out here this year, it seems like there are orange barrels everywhere you look. We've also seen a lot more hitch-hikers and people stranded begging for gas money, and a lot of cars loaded with belongings where people are moving in search of work.

Right now we are on our frist load after taking four days off, and it has been a pain so far. We got to the shipper half an hour late, so we had to wait almost 8 hours to get loaded because they bumped us to the end of the line. Once we were loaded we went and weighed and were over gross (we can only weigh a total of 80,000lbs, but we were at 80,160) so we had to go back to the shipper to have some freight taken off. We ended up sitting for another 5 hours waiting for that, so now the load is going to be late getting up to Rhode Island. The northwest isn't fun under the best of curcumstances.

Well, I've got to get some sleep so we can push this load through. I'llo try to keep this blog updated a little more regularly.