The issue at my shipper for this load turned out to be one of generic incompetence that was easily remedied. The trailer that was found to be empty last night was not in fact the trailer that I was supposed to pull. Someone had simply put the wrong number on the bills. The remedy was for the shipping lady to cross out that trailer number and write in another. Voilà. Ready to roll. There's really no reason that I should have had to wait twelve hours for this resolution to come about, but we'll just have to see how much (if any) detention pay shows up on my paycheck.
I hooked to my loaded trailer and checked the packing list inside to make sure that they had given me the right number this time around. They had. It was all good. Okay then, let's roll. The drive got pretty damned weird in the early going. I took OK-18 up to Chandler in order to catch the turnpike. The combination of the rising sun, the morning traffic, and my 43,000 pound payload combined to require some extra careful driving on my part. Then, just before I reached I-44, there were a couple of bizarre blind turns that were anything but fun. No worries though. I'm a professional... or something. Once I hit the freeway everything was back to normal.
I was bouncing across Missouri and making pretty good time by the point when I reached a construction zone just before Rolla. Traffic came to a dead stop and then started rolling at roughly 10mph for several miles. The westbound guys on the CB were saying that there was no reason for us to be going so slowly, other than the motorist in the pickup truck at the front of the line. Apparently he simply felt like taking his time. The speed limit in the work zone was 60mph. We were going 10mph. I can tell you this much. I'll kick that son of a bitch in the fellas if I ever cross his path.
After dealing with that nonsense, I decided that it was about time to get off the road and enjoy an Italian BMT with double meat. As fate would have it, there was a Love's with a SubWay at the second or third exit after the work zone. Beauty. With my belly full and my blood temperature returning to a level below boiling, I took a look at my atlas and found that I've already covered more than half the trip to Romeoville. Good enough for me then. I'd rather take my crack at St. Louis on a Saturday morning anyway. Nothing good could come from driving any further on a Friday afternoon.
Tomorrow morning's agenda seems to be shaping up quite nicely. It will take a hundred miles or so for me to get out of Missouri. Then I'll head up I-55 and start looking for one of those billboards that strikes my fancy. You know the ones - They say $34.95 a night with truck parking, then you check in and they tell you that it's $59.99 a night, so you're inclined to tell them to get bent, but you've already gone through the hassle of parking in their little bullshit lot and you really want to take a shower and watch some football, so you just grab your ankles and deal with it. Yeah, I'll be looking for one of those billboards tomorrow.
Looks like it should be a fun one...
Should be smooth (relatively speaking) sailing through StL. No major road destruction right now.
ReplyDeleteSounds like we're heading straight through then.
ReplyDelete"Road destruction" is probably the most accurate description that I've heard. It seems that they're always "fixing" the roads that aren't broken, while the roads that will knock the fillings out of your teeth are left alone.
Anyhow, thanks for the heads-up.