9/14/07

I was able to wait long enough to complete a 34 hour restart at home before running over to the customer this morning. Once I got there, things went pretty quickly and I was dispatched back to the terminal. I told them to give me a call when my turn came up, as I was #7 on the board. The guys in Taylor usually say they'll call me and they never do, but there was no point in hanging around the yard waiting for my turn.

I began day one of the 'bunk up' experiment this afternoon. I went through the truck pretty thoroughly. Everything on board was put to a simple test. Have I touched it within the last month? If the answer was 'no,' the item was removed from the truck. I managed to clear enough clutter to allow me to raise the top bunk. Until today, I had used it for storage. I'm not really sure why I felt like changing it, but a change of scenery seemed to be in order, so there you go. We'll see how long it takes until I start looking around the truck for something that I left at home today.

I spent the bulk of my afternoon playing Civilization III on my desktop PC at home. The Russians sneak-attacked me, so I brought the British and the Germans in to help out. Then the Germans turned on me, so I got the Greeks and Chinese on my side. Then the Germans turned the British against me. It was a long and brutal struggle, but I prevailed.

I called the CFI phone system periodically to check my board status. #5, #5, #5, #4, #4, #3, #3, #3, #3, #3 (#3 took a while), "You have a message pending and are assigned to a load."

What happened to #2? I have a full slate of hours available, so I guess I jumped a couple of people. I didn't get a choice of loads, which caused a little concern. As today passed without me going anywhere, I was faced with the choice to just take my home time now or run the risk of getting an unfavorable assignment vis a vis my plans for next week. In a perfect world, I would go somewhere east of the Mississippi, around 500-600 miles from home. That way I could highlight tomorrow and get another 500-600 miles coming back up.

So the suspense must be killing you at this point. How did the Godfather's gambit play out? I was sent to Stony Ridge, Ohio to take a relay from another driver and run it to Virginia for tomorrow morning. Beauty. That will be perfect.

On the way down, I noticed that a hissing sound was coming from my dashboard. It sounded to me like there was something letting air escape and my tanks were pumping the air out as the compressor pumped it in. That's what it sounded like to me. I'm not a mechanic. I pulled over and checked it out. Turns out I was right. One of the air chambers on my trailer was failing to hold air. With the truck rolling, enough air was being pumped back there to operate the brakes, but it wasn't good. So I was in a pretty shitty spot. I didn't want to give the other driver a broken trailer but I needed to make my relay. When I got to the Petro on I-280, they had me in the bay almost immediately. Now, once I'm out (which should be very soon) I'll be good to go.

Overnight driving, the stuff that dreams are made of.