5/15/09

A quick public service announcement for the youngsters out there - If you choose to procrastinate, then you will have to accept the consequences.

I wasn't in the mood to get going this morning so I wound up dawdling around until around 11am. I had plenty of time to cover today's miles so it wasn't a big issue on the scheduling front. What my lazy morning earned me, however, was a trip around the Beltway during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. Thus I procrastinated and the consequence pretty much sucked.

By the time I got past D.C. I was pretty fed up with the world. I've never tried LSD, but I was definitely suffering an ASA flashback. (That's Austin-San Antonio for the uninitiated. You fight your way through one pain in the ass city and get onto the open road for a half hour, just in time to hit another pain in the ass city.) I decided to park at a rest area between D.C. and Baltimore for a couple of hours and let the traffic in Baltimore mellow out before I finished the trip. This worked out pretty well as the traffic was light on the rest of the trip into Pennsylvania.

I checked in at the consignee in Hazleton and got directions to a warehouse down the street where I had to drop my trailer. That part was easy enough but procrastination round #2 (the break at the rest area) got me another unintended consequence. The guy who dropped a half hour before I got here was able to grab the last empty trailer. This consignee doesn't have a weekend shift so there won't be any empties here until Monday at the earliest. Oh well, you win some and you lose some.

I got on the board without an empty (at #8) so we'll have to see what happens from here. The last time that I had to find an empty in Pennsylvania, this is where they sent me. That strategy obviously won't work this time around. My best hope would be that they have a weekend run leaving this shipper, on a pre-loaded trailer. I've had weekend runs out of here before. The fact that there are seven trucks ahead of me on the board will probably keep me from getting one of those loads though. I don't know. Whatever. It's out of my hands so I won't sweat it. I'm at 2,190 miles so far for the week. I would prefer a few hundred more miles but it's not a huge deal.