3/24/10

What is the story with that rest area near Salado?  Holy smokes.  After rolling up Satan's Driveway last night (and encountering lane closures in Austin to negate the light 2:15am traffic, just for the record) I started to get a little tired.  I thought that I would try to duck off and sleep for a few hours before finishing the trip.  I was wrong.  Quite a few of the Texas rest areas are tough to navigate late at night.  When the benevolent truck drivers of the world need to rest and they don't find a parking space, they're often inclined to say fuck everybody else and park in a manner that blocks the road.  It's pretty aggravating, but to an extent I do understand.  I would guess that the number of trucks on the road has grown much faster than the amount of available parking over the years.

That rest area on I-35 is one of the upgraded locations though.  Where there once were a few parallel parking spaces, it now has a nice big truck parking area.  I've stopped there before and found that there were people parked parallel to the road and behind the rows of angled parking spaces, blocking access to spots that become empty after someone leaves.  What I encountered last night was of a whole other magnitude.  Holy smokes.  The driveways, which are not wide enough for trucks to park on them, had trucks parked on them.  The parking spaces were full.  The rows of people blocking access to the parking spaces were three deep.  That's not an exaggeration.  Three rows of trucks were parked behind the actual parking area.  How in the hell could any of those people leave?  They were blocked from every direction.  And what in the hell was the attraction about that particular rest area?

In any event, it took some extremely slow maneuvering to make my way back out to the freeway.  I decided to suck it up and drive straight to the customer's location, where I would be able to take a nap before my 8am appointment.  I found a locked gate, parked along the little access road, and hopped in the sack.  A guy woke me at 6:30am and told me to back into a certain door, then said that they didn't start work until 7:15am.  Gee, could have let me sleep a little longer then, eh champ?

Once I was unloaded at the first stop, I drove across to the other side of Waco to make my second delivery.  It had been scheduled as a drop/hook but, on account of the fact that I only had two pallets of freight, they decided to make it a live unload.  So I got to sit at the dock for ten minutes instead of dropping and hooking trailers.  Works for me.

I scooted over to the Pilot in Robinson for some much-needed sleep.  That place looks like a de facto Con-way Truckload terminal more often than not nowadays, given the number of loads that we carry into and out of Waco.  Today was no exception.  After getting drawn into the obligatory 'this is bullshit' conversation with a CTL colleague who has apparently been stuck in the black hole for a week, I finally climbed into bed and I was out before the first sheep was counted.  The nice cloudy and cool weather was a big help.

At some point in the afternoon, my satellite unit woke me with a new assignment.  Predictable patterns tend to produce predictable outcomes.  The pattern in question would be that any delivery in the area between Dallas and Austin will tend to be followed by a regional load out of Waco.  No different today, although this Texas regional trip is probably a little better than most.  I had to pick up at 8pm.  My ten hour break would be over at 7:45pm.  Good enough.  The shipper was only a few miles away.

I rolled over there as soon as it was legal to do so and made a quick drop/hook.  From Waco, tonight's drive took me westward on TX-6 through the countryside and onto I-20.  Aside from some rain here and there, causing the Texans to panic (as is their custom), there wasn't much to talk about.  Just a pretty relaxing night on the road.  Now, getting to the part where this trip is better than most of those Waco runs - the dispatch clocks in at 294 miles and I'm scheduled to deliver in Big Spring at noon.  300 miles a day, with a few longer ones sprinkled in from time to time, is plenty for me.  And the noon delivery meant that I had time to take a ten hour break tonight and get back on something of a normal schedule.  All in all, not too bad.

I spotted a sign for a rest area between Clyde and Abilene, to bring the story full circle.  If I could find a parking spot, I would be able to get some rest and then drive the last 120 miles in the morning.  I wasn't too optimistic when I saw that it was one of the old-style rest areas with only a handful of parallel parking spaces.  Not much chance of having any luck in that case, given the late hour.  The place actually turned out not to be crowded at all though, so here we are.  And that, my friends, puts an end to a long, long day.  Goodnight.