4/3/09

We'll get you going this evening with a couple of questions. What would be the standard play from the CTL playbook after I make a delivery in Jacksonville? Did they follow the playbook today?

So another early morning for me - 4:30am as I hit the freeway. This got me out of Nashville before the traffic picked up and things were quite reasonable as I got through Chattanooga. The first of today's many clusterfucks came as I approached the exit for the Atlanta bypass. It looked like a box truck ran into a trailer being towed by a pickup truck, but I was too busy dodging cars to get a good look. I wasn't sure if I would get back to the exit in time after making my way around, but there wound up being enough room. No need to test my luck going through on I-75 if I didn't have to, so that was nice.

The traffic on the loop itself was moving along smoothly, but the stretch of I-75 between Atlanta and Macon was bumper to bumper. I'm not sure what that was all about. The prevalence of trailers and luggage would lead me to believe that Spring Break is involved though. Just as things started to shake out, I got a quick reminder of those old driving school lessons - keep a safe following distance and leave yourself an out. A guy pulling a travel trailer cut me off so I slowed down to open up a gap. Then one of the tires on his trailer shredded. I was able to dodge the tire as it flew up in the air by moving onto the shoulder for a second. Then the dude kept rolling along with the trailer riding on the rim.

There couldn't be a good outcome from that arrangement but my truck only goes 65mph. I wouldn't be able to pass him and I had no desire to stay behind him. I got lucky when he had to slow for a merging vehicle and I was able to get next to him and blast my horn. My knowledge of highway sign language consists mainly of my fully extended middle finger, but in this case I used the good old thumb to the rear gesture in an effort to get him to pay attention to his trailer. He looked over at me and then pulled off onto the shoulder. I don't know. Maybe a disaster was avoided or maybe he would have been fine without a tire. Either way, I was glad to be past him and back on my merry way.

Five minutes later, I shit you not, two tires exploded on the rear trailer of an ABF set right in front of me. This time my out was in the left lane, but again it was the good old safe following distance that saved the day. Those big rig tires would have done considerably more damage than the little travel trailer tire from the first incident and they bounced quite a bit higher too. At least the ABF driver noticed his misfortune and pulled over right away, unlike the other guy. Okay then, continuing on down the highway...

I caught a nice ten mile backup from mile 59 to mile 49, but never did see the cause of the mess. The northbound side was backed up through the same stretch and I didn't notice any issues on their side either. Then suddenly everybody was going the speed limit again. Weird.

Everything was relatively normal through the rest of Georgia and onto I-10 in Florida. In an odd twist, the worst accident of the day was on I-10 and it didn't affect the flow of traffic at all. A truck pulling a trailer with one or two cars on it had gone off the road and into the trees. The emergency personnel at the scene were setting up some kind of tent, so one might conclude that they were investigating something worse than property damage. Hopefully not, but it sure didn't look good.

After slugging through all of that, I got a pre-plan for my next assignment. To answer your intro questions, the standard playbook calls for a load of paper out of Palatka and yes, that's exactly what I got. It has to pick up by tomorrow afternoon and deliver in Perrysburg, Ohio on Monday morning.

I got to the ConWay yard in Jacksonville a few minutes later for my drop/hook. Back it into Door 32 and leave the doors closed? That's a weird one. Whatever dude. I just do what I'm told. I grabbed an empty there and then headed down to the south side of Jacksonville to spend the night. My dispatch to Palatka included the number of the loaded trailer that I am to pick up, most likely meaning that it's ready to go, but the sequence of traffic jams didn't leave me with enough hours to get there tonight.

I'll come in under 3,000 miles for the week, breaking my little mini-streak, but 2,927 ain't half bad. I'm not doing quite as well as George Soros during our little recession here, but I seem to be holding my own.