6/29/08

Ahh yes, back to the good old daily grind. I had to wake up before 7:30am and report for duty. Preliminary reports indicate that this was about four hours earlier than I would have liked to wake up. The dispatcher in Taylor got me on the board at #3 and said it would probably be a while, so I went back to bed. Beauty.

Around 8:30am, I got up to use the bathroom and called the 800 number to see where I stood. I was already assigned to a load. How about that? So I made another call to the terminal to find out what kind of timeline I would be facing. Pick up in Plymouth, Michigan today at 3pm. Okay, good. Probably a wicked heavy water load, but still good as far as timing goes. Deliver tomorrow afternoon in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Home run. Good miles for my first trip back on the road, time for a nap before I picked up, plenty of time to stop and rest tonight whenever I felt like it, and no goofy early or late delivery time tomorrow.

On the way to Plymouth, I got a call from my roommate. He uses my car every now and then when I'm out of town, so he had dropped me off at the terminal when I went back to work. My new medical card was sitting on the front seat of my car. Great. I pulled into a rest area on I-275 and waited for him to bring the card to me. I still made it to the pick up a few minutes early, so good enough I guess.

The shipper (yeah, it was the water place) had me loaded and rolling today around 5pm. Two hours at the dock is about as good as it gets for those guys. When I went back to close my trailer doors, I saw that the pallets of water came all the way to the back. That can't be good. I checked the bills, thinking that maybe this load was lighter than usual. If so, the back axles would maybe be okay, even with some weight all the way to the doors. Nope. A full 44,000 pounder. Shit.

The nearest scale was a good twenty miles away, so I set the wheels quite a way back and headed off. Once I scaled, I knew I was going to have some issues. 36,000 on the rears. Damn! So I counted off another five holes and slid 'em back to there. 34,180 on the rears. Damn! One more hole and one more re-weigh got me under 34,000. At that point, the maximum wheelbase laws would be the only issue. Technically speaking, I'm not sure that I could drive this thing in any of the states along my route with the wheels as far back as they are. I'm not completely stretched out, but they're pretty damn far back there. Without taking out a tape measure and my atlas to nail down exact numbers, I decided that I was close enough to press on. Driving twenty miles back to the shipper and finding someone to re-work the load sounded worse than being a few inches longer than I should be, since the weights were all good at that point.

About the only thing I wanted to accomplish tonight was to get past Chicago. I knew that, given the last few days' activities, I would most likely get tired after a few hours on the road. As long as I could hang in there and get clear of Chicago tonight though, tomorrow would stand to be a much better day. It would really suck to wake up and idle through Chicago traffic for three hours in the morning. I got through in pretty decent shape, given the never-ending construction and ridiculously ubiquitous rain.

I pulled into the rest area in Belvidere to see if there might be a place to park for the night. There was a single spot, bordered by a guy who can't park straight (on the left). This particular spot also sat in front of an asswipe who parked along the back, in a non-parking zone. Usually that stuff is more of an annoyance than a problem, but today I had to squeeze in with my extra long wheelbase. I was able to keep just a sliver of light between myself and the dipshit on my left as I swung in from the shallow approach angle caused by the dipshit behind me. Fun, fun, fun. I only have around four or five hours to go tomorrow, so I'm fully expecting a lot less hassle than what today brought.