3/16/10

Have I ever told you folks about the ice skating exhibition that I attended many years ago with my ex-wife?  I just tried a couple of Google searches of my blog and nothing turned up, so I guess maybe I haven't.  Anyhow, I used to work at Pizza Hut back in the day.  While I was making dough and sauce and such in the morning, I would listen to the local Detroit radio station and call in whenever they had some kind of giveaway.  I was Caller X a handful of times, winning various prizes.  One of the prizes was a pair of tickets to Stars on Ice or some such thing.  So my wife and I drove out to Auburn Hills and checked out the show.

There were two people sitting in my section that I'll never forget.  An old hillbilly guy and his wife.  They fit in among the figure skating crowd about as well as I did, which is to say not at all.  So the skaters would come out and perform their little routines to the music and then pose for applause once they were finished.  The guy in my section would stand up and shout, for each and every performer, "More sugar!  More sugar!"  To this day, I have no earthly idea what he meant.  Also to this day, he's inextricably associated with sugar in my mind.  Yeah, I have issues.

Given the bizarre connotation of the word 'sugar' for me, one might suspect that I would remember that it's sugar, not paper, that is shipped out of Clewiston.  We get our paper loads from Palatka, up toward Jacksonville.  So I had the right idea but the wrong commodity when I made my guess last night.  I was sent to the sugar plant in Clewiston this morning for my next load.  Just as heavy as paper and the factory is just as smelly.  But technically I guess there's a difference.

It didn't take too long for them to load my 45,600 pounds of freight and send me on my way.  I'm headed to Maryland, so today's route took me up US-27 to I-4 and then over to the coast.  As I fought my way through the traffic on US-27, I spotted a van that made me laugh out loud.  I thought about snapping a picture, but the traffic was heavy and I'm not all that handy with my new phone yet.  You'll have to settle for one from the interwebs.

That's funny, man.  I don't care what anybody says.  Sums up my impression of US-27 in rather efficient terms.  Freaking blue hairs.

I got through Jacksonville in decent shape, although things did come to a stop for a few minutes right around the I-10 split.  Then the traffic through Georgia was flowing pretty well.  Plenty of construction but no major delays.  As I got up toward Savannah, I decided that I would go into South Carolina and stop at either Exit 8 or Exit 68 for the night.  I'm generally prone to procrastination so Exit 8 seemed more likely.  Once I got up there though, I figured that another hour on the road tonight wouldn't be too bad.  This would cut down on tomorrow's drive and I knew that there was a SubWay at the truck stop off Exit 68.  Bad call.

About five miles up the road, everything came to a dead stop.  A foodservice truck pulling double trailers had gone off into the trees.  A few other trucks were parked along the shoulder, along with cops and paramedics and other such people.  Both traffic lanes were getting through, but the pace was about 2mph.  Then, after another few miles, stop again.  A truck was broken down in the right lane.  Not off to the right or anything.  Smack dab in the middle of the right lane.  So everyone in the big traffic pileup from the accident site was forced to move into the left lane in order to get by.  Okay, rolling along... stop again.  Left lane closed for construction.  With so many cars bunched into such a tight space, the previous jam just repeated itself.  That last sixty miles wound up taking a little over an hour and a half. 

I still got settled in before my hours ran out though, so good enough.  For the second time in a row, I actually managed to get an afternoon delivery appointment.  I'm due in Jessup, Maryland at 1pm on Thursday.  I don't really care to park at the T/A up there tomorrow, so I'll most likely stop somewhere short of D.C. and then finish off the run on Thursday morning.  You know what that means for tomorrow, right?  No alarm clock.  Beauty.  And, despite the delays, I got to the SubWay here in Canadys before it closed for the night.  Beauty.

About all that is missing at this point are the parachuting bears tracking down Bin Laden.  How sweet would that be?