3/31/08

First things first - I had to deliver the load that I brought down from Virginia. The broker was right down the street from the terminal. I was idling along when I spotted the address for which I was searching. Seeing that the first driveway was obviously not a truck entry, I continued to the other end of the building. No other driveway? Surely you jest. So yeah, another one of those. I got in and found enough room to turn around and set up for what amounted to a serpentine backing job around various obstacles. I guess sometimes you do use that stuff you learn in school. In my case, it seems to be more than sometimes, but you know.

Back at the terminal, I had to thank God that ole Al Gore was kind enough to invent the internet for us. It was Opening Day in Detroit, I was in Laredo, and I got to watch the game. I snagged the IdleAire signal from the CalArk terminal across the street, giving me plenty of speed to watch the video stream provided by some anonymous fella:

That's shrunk down in order to fit the blog, but you can see that the video quality is pretty solid. If only the outcome had been equally solid. Oh well, 161 games to go and we're only one game out of first. We'll get there.

The game went into extra innings as I kept inching my way up the board. Just after the final out, I got called into dispatch. Beauty timing. Then I got exactly what I expected - a choice of shitty, shittier, or shittiest. Fort Worth for tomorrow morning, Temple for tomorrow morning, or some multi-stop thing ending in Missouri on Thursday. The Missouri thing was out. I can't afford to waste half a week on that short of a run right now, given that I'm planning some home time in the near future. So I took Fort Worth. Temple would have meant fewer miles, and I still would have wound up under Lancaster's control in the morning. As it is, I got 428 miles for today so that's not so bad. Normally I wouldn't have been too happy about waiting all day for a dispatch, but given the ballgame it's all good.

So I headed north. The other good side of getting out of Laredo later in the day was that the traffic on most of Satan's Driveway, aka I-35, wasn't as bad as usual. Austin, however... I just don't have the words man. Perfect road conditions, virtually no traffic, 35mph in all four lanes. Why? No, seriously. Why? Then the freeway was down to one lane up by exit 260, causing another minor delay. I put the blame for that one squarely on the residents six miles to the west.

I stopped off at a parking area on 35W for the night. From here it will be about a 45 minute drive to the consignee in the morning. The directions say that they won't take the load more than ten minutes early, which is likely an exaggeration, but I didn't see a point in driving all the way to Fort Worth and looking for a parking space this late at night. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I won't have to wait all day tomorrow to take another overnight run out of Dallas, but I've learned not to get my hopes up too high.