The Devil Trailer

I can't believe 5 days are gone already, and it's Sunday afternoon. I've been quite a distance since I last had wifi, I'm currently in Missouri. From Maryland we headed north into New Jersey to pick up a load bound for Rochester, NY. It was a short run, but at this point, and drive time counts towards my hours. In Rochester we unloaded and then headed into an old Kodak plant that's been closed for a number of years and is just being reopened and converted to other storage/manufacturing facilities as people need. We picked up a load of Newman's Own pasta sauce headed for New Jersey. About an hour down the road we found a CAT Scale because we knew the load was heavy. And heavy it was. The gross weight of the truck was about 400lbs shy of being overweight. The maximum weight of a truck and trailer is 80,000lbs, and we had somewhere around 43,000lbs of sauce in glass jars behind us. In The Devil Trailer. (I'll save all the math and specifics about weights and distribution of said weight -- it's boring and difficult to explain in type).

The Devil Trailer. We started calling it that because of it's number -- 66672. Its just one of those things -- you know it's going to cause trouble at some point, so you hope you can leave it off somewhere and get another trailer. We weren't so lucky. Our goal for this trip was to make it to a truck stop about an hour from our destination and shut down for the night, delivering in the morning. That's when 66672 came up and bit us in the ass. About 2 miles from the truck stop, one of the trailer tires let go, leaving an entire recap in the road. It didn't hurt us any, but the guy behind us may very well have needed new underwear once his heart slowed down a bit (word to the wise -- don't tailgate a truck, tires are BIG, and you're small). So we hobbled up the road, and sent a message to Werner Breakdown that we lost a tire and needed service. We got into the service bay at the truck stop quickly; but that's when things went downhill in a hurry. Werner was quick about getting the info to the repair facility, but the mechanics were in no hurry to get any work done. We sat. And sat. And sat. We went off and both got showers. And sat. You get the idea. Finally after 3 hours we find out that they're trying to get Werner to authorize the replacement of a trailer mudflap because the tire leaving the trailer ripped it a little. Werner said no, and since it was already on there, the shop had to eat the loss I guess. The whole time we were watching the shitshow at the fuel islands of trucks trying to go in 14 directions, all crossing each other's paths, and saw 2 or 3 close calls because the drivers were in the "ME FIRST DAMNIT" mindset about getting through. At any rate, we got a good night's sleep and delivered the next morning with no further delays or problems. From where we unloaded, we took The Devil Trailer about 30 minutes north to Newark where we pulled into a Wal Mart contractor's distribution yard. We left the trailer for some other poor fool to have, picking up a mixed load going to a Distribution Center (DC) in Tennessee. It was a nice light load we had, about 20,000lbs.

Being in Tennessee was a new experience for me. I was quite surprised to find that it reminds me of New England - the hills are similar, as are some of the trees. After we dropped the Wal Mart trailer, we went around the back of the building and picked up a trailer bound for Missouri with 540 2nd-hand pallets on it. We were rolling around 11am, and somehow I managed to drive for 5 hours without a break. Greg had gone to lay down for a bit, and when he came back up front, he was back on his quest to find a Wal Mart somewhere. As we got close to the end of Tennessee where it runs into Kentucky, we found a good sized town with a lot of shopping, and Wal Mart!! We stocked up on food, got lunch/dinner, and headed back out.

That 5 hours I'd driven felt more like 2.5 to me. It wasn't until I did the math that I realized it. Along the way we had passed though Knoxville and Nashville. Both were incredibly underwhelming from the view I had. The only interesting part was watching the cars. As it turned out, yesterday the Titans were playing the Colts in Nashville. I've heard the saying "Around here, sports is a religion" a million times. I never really believed it, until I saw Titans fans on the road. People will do ANYTHING to show their support. Every other car had those little flags closed into the rolled up windows, many had magnets or stickers; but the best was the Hummer H3 that was white with orange fender flares, a HUGE orange 'T' on the hood, and a 'T' on each door. Now that's dedication. Or stupidity. There's a fine line, I'd say.

As we headed across the TN/KY line, we went from New England-style hills/mountains to flat. Just plain old flat. Kentucky is a polar opposite of Tennessee. And it's literally at the state line where the change is. The mountains are gone, traded for some rolling fields where you can see 2 days in any direction. We got off the interstate in Paducah, KY, (I love that name, don't ask me why, I just do). From there we headed "off through the woods" as Greg puts it, to shave about 60 miles off the trip. We ran some small roads that were similar to running Rt 4 through New Hampshire. Very narrow, twisty and rough. Of course, I love a challenge, so I hunkered down and took the bull by the horns. About 3/4 of the way across from Paducah to the Missouri state line, you cross the Ohio River, followed closely by the Mississippi River, where the meet. The bridges crossing said rivers are something to behold. They only give you about 6 inches of play-space between the center line and the concrete and steel railing. Greg was kind enough to inform me that while I was all smiles making these crossings, he's had grown men in tears crossing these bridges -- in daylight. It was dark when I did it. Even the full moon wasn't offering much extra light. (Yep, tooting my own horn, yet again :-p ) I'm hoping we can go back through that route sometime, in daylight though. The rivers looked beautiful.

So here we sit now, about 20 miles north of where we crossed into Missouri, in Cape Girardeau, MS, awaiting 9am Monday so we can unload. Currently we have a load assigned to us to pick up tomorrow that's going back to PA. We'll be hauling a load of diapers to Scranton.