5/22/10

Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that you own the store in this picture and the parking lot that accompanies it.  You probably thought that it would be a good investment to put in a parking area that could hold around thirty trucks, given that there are a few big industrial parks in your town.  Have the truck drivers stop in, spend some money, and all that jazz.  Good business move.  But what would be the thought process behind a 30 minute parking limit?  Even if we assume that anyone would observe such a limit (which they don't), exactly how many freaking truck drivers would you expect to accomodate in a given convenience store during a given day?  I don't know.  Just seems a little excessive to me.  The potential income from having some people stay overnight, with the possibility of multiple store purchases, is probably a better bet.  As for my own parking situation at the moment, we'll just leave that part open to interpretation.  Wherever I am, I've been here for several hours and nobody has left.  I can tell you that much.

I was up fairly early this morning on account of having consumed a big bottle of water before bedtime last night.  After watering some nearby shrubbery for a moment, I sent in my updated hours to reflect a full 11 and 14, then went back to bed.  After another couple of hours I was awake for real, so I decided to drive back down the street to the truck stop and try my luck.  Once I got about a mile down the road I received a new assignment.  Okay then.

After hearing the satellite voice chick tell me that my next pickup would be in Breinigsville, I skipped the truck stop in Gouldsboro and continued southward.  The dispatch was only for 88 miles so I figured I might as well just get it over with.  The drive actually turned out to be a bit shorter, as my trip odometer shows 74 miles for today and I'm right down the street from my next shipper.  The only truck stop that I knew in this area was the one in New Smithville.  I don't like that place though, so I decided to check out the industrial area near the water factory in Breinigsville.  I had seen trucks coming from the direction of the aforementioned convenience store once or twice in the past, so I was hoping to find a truck parking area.  I was surprised to see that the truck parking area was fairly large and easy to access.  I also was surprised to see that they impose a 30 minute limit on truck parking.  No overnight parking, all that nonsense.  I have to pick up right down the street from that store tomorrow morning, so as I said before, we'll leave my present whereabouts open to interpretation.

I'll get the pleasure of dragging my ~46,000 pounds of water down past Baltimore and D.C. tomorrow, for a Monday morning delivery in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  Since today ends the pay period, this morning's short 88-mile dispatch wraps up the week.  Tomorrow's short 240-mile trip will be my first dispatch in the next pay period.  So this week ends with a mediocre 2,233 miles plus somewhere around $50 in northeast pay and $70 in stop pay.  That leaves us a little below $1,000 for the week.  On the flip side though, next week will be off to something of a decent start.  I almost never get any dispatched miles on Sundays.  Usually Sunday and part of Monday are spent finishing off the work from the previous week.  This time around I'll be empty on Monday morning and I'll already have one trip in the books.  Good enough.

Now back to our regularly scheduled boredom...