1/4/10

A day with no alarm clock... ahh yes, this will be great, right? Wrong. I don't know what time I finally went to bed last night, but it was definitely late. As I was lying there trying to fall asleep, someone started banging on my door. I looked at my clock and saw 5am. This means that it was 4am in Illinois. There is no reason for anyone to be banging on my door at 4am. I ignored the noise and tried again to fall asleep. After a couple of minutes, the banging resumed. This time it was even louder. What the fuck, man? Without stepping into the front part of the truck, since we've already established that there's no reason for anyone to be banging on my door at 4am, I tried to peek around the corner and see if I could tell what was going on. Nothing visible in either mirror. Nothing visible in front of the truck. Screw 'em. I tried going to sleep for a third time.

If you've done any regular reading of this here blog, then you probably know how this part of the story ends. I was wide awake. Son of a... I took a peek at my log book and saw that I had already been parked for ten hours. I could head down the road for a while and then take an eight hour sleeper berth break later in the morning. After the break I could finish the trip to Kentwood and take a two hour break to complete my split, all within the time that was available to me. So I headed out.

It was looking like a fortuitous situation for a little while. Being able to cruise out of the Chicago area before people start heading to work is always a good thing. Then I-94 turned to the north. Well hell, it looks like ole Lake Michigan hasn't frozen yet, eh? When those winter storms move over the water, the western part of the state gets pummeled pretty thoroughly. The effect seems to lessen after the lake is frozen, but we're not there yet. The air temperature started to rise steadily and the roads started to get snowy. There were some stretches that had been well salted and were only wet. There were other stretches where the snow was coming down like a mutha and it was all I could do to follow the tire ruts in front of me. The first part of I-196 was particularly bad, so I resolved to take my break at the next rest area. That way, after I woke and started driving again, hopefully the plow trucks would have been out and made some improvements. The joke was on me though, as that rest area was closed. So I got to slug along to the big truck stop in Holland and take my break there.

It was 8am by the time I pulled into the truck stop. To quote Carlito Brigante - "Tired baby, tired." I was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow. I woke around noon and saw that I had a satellite message waiting. Somehow I had managed to sleep through the beep. I took a look, assuming that it would be one of those "stay safe" notices or something. It was a message from my fleet manager, saying that he knew my miles were down over the last week and he would work on getting me another load. I'm not sure exactly what that was about, but fine with me. I had 2,531 miles last week, with an intervening holiday, so I had no complaints.

I was tempted to head back up the road for a while at that point and see if I could deliver early. I had a 6pm appointment though. If the consignee made me wait and then took too long to unload my trailer, I would likely run into issues with my 14 hour clock. I had started driving at 5:30am, meaning that 7:30pm would be the end of the line. So I decided to stay put until my full 8 hour break was complete. This way the 14 hour rule would be taken out of play, regardless of the consignee's actions. Time to play around on the interwebs for a while.

At 4pm I headed back out to the highway and found that the road situation had been handled. Everything was clean and dry. Beauty. The customers had me unloaded quickly and I was once again on my way. The nearest truck stop was on the south side of Grand Rapids so I headed over there. I was surprised to find the place so crowded in the early evening but I managed to find a spot. Good enough.

I was #9 on the board, meaning I didn't expect much to happen tonight. After about a half hour my next assignment came through. I'll be picking up in Kalamazoo tomorrow afternoon and heading for Eastern Pennsylvania for a delivery on Thursday morning. Not a huge start to the week by any means, but the schedule is pretty favorable for me. No early morning nonsense and so forth. Maybe I'll catch a nice run for the weekend to bail out the week or something.

Kalamazoo isn't far from here and I'm already headed in the right general direction, so I think I'm going to stay put for the night. I have my parking space and that's enough for me. I used to know a pretty cool chick from this area but apparently I don't have her phone number anymore. Bummer. And no football tonight? [EDIT: Yeah, I see now that the Fiesta Bowl is tonight.] Not even a Red Wings game? Damn. Guess I might as well walk over and see what this Piccione's Pizzeria place is all about.