7/9/09

♫ ...The cock, he crew in the mornin'
He crew both loud and shrill
I awoke in California
Many miles from Spancil Hill... ♫

I managed to go to bed early enough to get some sleep before this morning's 2am alarm. And I think I finally reached dreamland maybe an hour before the alarm went off. That sucked. Then, to add insult to injury, my load wasn't ready until the last second. I could have used that extra hour and a half of sleep. Oh well. Off to the big road...

I managed to hit Sacramento right at rush hour in the morning. Then I realized that Sacramento is largely irrelevant in the world of rush hour traffic. I didn't hit any slowdowns so I had time for a fuel stop and a bite to eat in Dunnigan before finishing the trip to Redding. This was my first trip to the Con-way terminal in Redding. And, right on cue, I passed the terminal as I turned onto the street where it is located. That's a tiny little rinky-dink facility and you have to make an immediate left into the lot once you reach the street. So I continued onward, looking for somewhere to turn around. And I continued... and I continued. There was nowhere that I could turn around and the road got progressively skinnier and skinner. It was starting to look pretty bleak when I spotted a little dirt path that seemed like it might do the trick.


I passed the path (moving toward the southwest) and backed my trailer into the opening in the trees, then used the wider area near the road to swing my tractor back toward the northeast. If not for that opening, I suspected that I was going to find myself in an impossible situation. This evening's review of the satellite image of the surrounding area seems to confirm my suspicion. Not lucky. Blessed.

Back at the yard, I got checked in and settled at the dock. The lady giving the instructions was clearly new at this game but she was quite beautiful, so somehow I didn't mind. My assignment said that I would be getting unloaded and keeping my trailer, but after an hour or so a guy told me that I could drop my trailer and pull the one from the next dock. Good deal. While I was sitting at the dock, one of my colleagues came over and mentioned that he had been given a damaged trailer and that the doors wouldn't close. I had some time to kill so I went over to see if the two of us could manage to get them shut so that he could take the trailer to a repair shop. The corner of the door on the right had been banged pretty hard and the hinges were all bent to hell. I was thinking that I could push on the top of the door while he tried to secure it and maybe we would have some luck. It turned out that I could climb up on the back of the trailer, but couldn't really apply a lot of force to the top of the door while still holding myself up. With a few tries, we managed to time it such that I swung over and gave the top of the door a shove and he engaged the latches before I lost my balance and had to jump down. Good deal. He still had to take the trailer to the shop but at least he wouldn't be going down the road with the doors halfway latched.

I found that I had a pre-plan waiting for me when I got back in my truck. There were essentially two questions to answer when I looked at the screen. Would I be getting away from the West Coast and would I get enough weekend miles to have a decent paycheck. Yes and... hell yes. I got a nice long deadhead back to the Con-way facility in Kettleman City and then a 2,131 mile run to Alabama for the weekend. Beauty. The usual Con-way routine would be to arrive at the terminal, drop my trailer, and spend the night, then leave with the load tomorrow. The mathematicians among you may already have figured out that this couldn't happen today. Seven hours of driving from Kettleman City to Redding would leave another seven hours of driving to get back to Kettleman City. We're allowed eleven hours in a day, so... yeah. I got down to Lodi tonight before hanging it up. I'll have to finish the drive down to Kettleman City in the morning and then make my drop/hook. I'm not due to pick up until 10am, so hopefully I'll manage to doze off for a few hours tonight before I have to get back on the road.

In following up on something mentioned in one of the recent comment threads, I fully recommend the BBC's series of Sherlock Holmes DVD's to those of you who are into that sort of thing. Jeremy Brett, in my humble opinion, is the quintessential Holmes. Think you can guess what I'm doing tonight?