The weather in New Mexico was cool enough to sleep with the truck off last night, so I managed to get a few hours of good sleep. Usually there are people around with their trucks idling at mach 5, but last night the truck stop in Alamorosa was quiet.
As I got rolling south, I had to pull into a weigh station on US-54. It was a little temporary setup, courtesy of the New Mexico DOT. They were rolling trucks across a portable scale and picking about every fourth one for a full-scale inspection. I just got the scale, thankfully. I don't imagine I would have had any major issues with an inspection, but you never know. On top of that I didn't allow myself a ton of extra time before my ETA in El Paso. Knowing that I would be going on the board once I was empty, I wanted to let my 14 hour clock run as late as possible. That way, if the consignee made me wait until the 11am appointment time, I wouldn't be burning hours as a result of arriving early. Anyhow, yeah, not much extra time so it was a good thing I didn't get inspected.
When I got to the customer in El Paso, they told me to park off to the side and wait for an open dock. At least that's what I was able to gather. My Spanish esta no bueno and the guy was speaking muy rapido. Between the little bit that I understood and the hand signals that we exchanged, I think I got the picture. When my turn came to back in, I found that it was a bit more of a challenge than I anticipated. The docks faced the street and, of course, there were cars on both sides. By cutting the trailer sharply in and then pulling into the driveway across the street, I was able to turn a difficult driver's side back into an easy blind side back. Sometimes I guess you have to think outside the box.
They unloaded me in a reasonable amount of time while I talked baseball with the guy next to me. He's a Cardinals fan from Albuquerque, so his recollection of the World Series is a little more favorable than mine. (On a related note, the Tigers officially ended my strike tonight.) The forklift guy was pulling the pallets off of my truck and putting them right onto a freight forwarder headed for Mexico. Call me stupid if you must, but I always assumed that the Mexicans grew their own beans. The thought of Colorado farmers exporting beans to Mexico would never have crossed my mind.
I headed back over to the yard and prepared to drop my trailer. Considering that I hauled 45,000 pounds of pinto beans, the trailer was a lot cleaner than I expected. It only took a minute to sweep. When I got back in the truck to pull out from under the trailer, I saw that I had a message. Already assigned to a load. Nice. I was to grab a trailer on the yard and head up to Groveport, Ohio for Monday morning. Can't complain there. 1,689 miles for the weekend to give my paycheck a much-needed kick in the ass and I get out of the desert. Plus it's only 13,000 pounds to boot. Damn, I must be living right.
When I ran the route through truckmiles.com I saw that they listed the practical mileage as 1,725. That route was all interstate but it looked like it went quite a bit out of the way. Since the load is light, I decided to check the shortest mileage - 1,599. That route didn't look too bad, so that's what I went with. I headed back up (my favorite road) US-54 to Tularosa, across to Roswell, and angled up through Amarillo. I'll run east into Oklahoma, then cut a pretty straight path northeast through Missouri and Illinois before heading back east toward my final destination.
Today's drive was a nice change of pace from the fully weighted ones I've been getting recently. I think my truck appreciates the break as well, seeing as it got around 7.5mpg for the day. There was ominous weather on the horizon all day, but apparently it was moving away from me. I caught a brief shower in the mountains east of Tularosa, but otherwise it was just windy and dry. The guard at the immigration checkpoint on 54 grilled me a little for some reason, but there were no real issues today.
I have to try one thing before I hit the sack for the night. In last night's post I concluded by writing, "Something to the midwest with enough miles to keep my weekend occupied would be nice." That's exactly what I got today. So...
A phone call from Julia Roberts, asking if she can tag along with me and learn about life on the road for a few weeks, would be nice.
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