7/11/08

I got beeped nice and early this morning. That was good. I had to go over to Bayonne and pick up a load heading back to the Columbus area. My five mile dispatch was rather humorous. I suppose that Bayonne may be five miles from Newark, but that's not how it worked out for me. First, you have the twelve miles that I drove last night in order to find a parking space. Then there's the six miles that it took this morning to get headed back north, since I was on the southbound side of the highway. Then there was the retracing of the miles from my parking spot to the I-78 interchange. Then there were the half-assed ambiguous directions and shitty signage that had me driving around the neighborhoods of Bayonne for a while. Par for the course, I guess.

After I found my way back to the truck route and eventually located my shipper, I was assigned to a door and loaded quickly. I knew that I had roughly a nine hour drive ahead of me. The question was whether it would be a long nine hours or an easy nine hours. The 13,000 pounds on the paperwork gave me hope. Going through those hills with a heavy one can be tedious. Today I had a fairly pleasant ride, retracing yesterday's route in reverse.

I had enough time on my dispatch to take a ten hour break tonight and then finish off the trip early in the morning. Knowing what I know about the consignee though, I decided to knock out the full trip and make my drop/hook tonight. They tend to take in a bunch of loaded trailers on the weekend and then run out of empties until they unload everything during the week. Better to get an empty and get on the board tonight, I suspect.

I was #1 when I got on the board, late at night, with nowhere to park. I decided to take the loop around to the west side of Columbus and park at our drop yard for the night. Since that was about a 25 mile drive, I'll probably get sent back to the east for my next load. That seems to be the way it goes. I'm up to 1,900 miles plus $65 in northeast pay for the week now, so one more decent trip over the weekend will do the trick.