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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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210209 IA-CA 2 RV's, 1 to Reno NV, 1 to Davis CA ... spending the night at Lake Point UT (as you can see by where we are spending the night, we did make it out of WY today) To get going at sun rise we set the alarm for 5:30. One of the first things we do is look at the road report. The roads are open :) Then at 5:54 the put restrictions on near Rawlins. BB is looking at the weather and can not see any reason for them doing that. Within a couple of minutes, that restriction is gone. ... and replaced with restrictions all the way from Laramie to Rawlins. Estimated time they will be lifted is 5 PM. Same as yesterday. So we go get our grab and go breakfast. Juice and a bag. In the bag is a cup of apple sauce and two breakfast bars. And we sit and wait. BB has been watching the weather and road reports enough that she knows how often they update the conditions. If the road conditions are updated on time, there is a good chance they will be lifting the restrictions soon. Such was the case at 10. The prior report hadn't been updated and then the restrictions were lifted. We were out of the hotel within about five minutes. And we didn't look at the conditions again until we were past where the restrictions had been. For once I was glad that the cruise control would kick off when it got windy. So as long as the cruise worked, we drove 65 mph. Once it kicked off, our speed dropped to 50-55 mph for the center stretch of this leg of the trip. Again today we passed a few semis there were doing 35-45 mph. And there were also the trucks that were doing the posted, 75 mph. I did follow one truck a ways where the trailer was really 'dog tailing' with every gust of wind. I only felt once where it blew me on to the shoulder. The rest of the time it was mostly hang on with both hands and be careful passing or being passed. 1st stop is the TA in Rawlins for fuel and food. BB needs fuel and we both need food. Subway. We ate in doors again. We are the only ones in the seating area. 2nd stop is the new Loves in Green River. It has opened since the last time we came this way two weeks ago. People are still painting and laying sod. Sod, mostly ground cover. Today they were laying the sod in the pet exercise area. The sod came in on skids and someone was using a shovel to try and pry the rolls apart. It looked like a few rolls didn't make it in one piece. 3rd stop was the Flying J in Evanston for fuel. $99 even for me. There should only be one more fuel stop for me. Up to this point we have seen a few travel trailers parked. Waiting for the wind to die down a little more? And a couple have passed us. Heading down the hill into SLC there are three RV's that pass us, surprisingly clean. For the last two legs of today, the cruise worked the whole way. 4th and final stop is the Comfort Inn in Lake Point. Once checked in, we walk across the street to the Flying J for shelf food. That is how bad this Denny's is. The last few times we have been here we have gotten shelf food. Anyplace else we would have to drive to. We could walk, but we would have to cross a lot of traffic and we get here at dark. This time we each get a piece of pizza plus we get a chef salad to split. No desert today. So our three hour delay this AM didn't set us back any thing, any miles any ways. This motel is $40 more than if we had made it to Wendover. Load board US - 312 IA - 141 MN - 3 WI - 2 The trip I was looking at moving within CA is now gone. The only truck out of CA now is heading to Las Vegas, and then there is one trip coming back from Las Vegas to CA. Almost a round trip. But the new one is long enough that we would have to sit over the weekend for a 'short' trip. When I used to run on my own, my miles goal was 600-650 miles a day. Now that we are running together our goal is 500, some days we hit 550. Today we drove 406 miles and it is the most miles we have done in one day for the last week. Looking at the weather nation wide, there isn't a good place to go. Not sure what we are going to do after we deliver. Forecast in the west is for two back to back storms that we would be following. 210210 IA-CA 2 RV's, 1 to Reno NV, 1 to Davis CA ... spending the night at Fernley NV After BB had set the alarm last night, we realized that if we got going as soon as we could order our permits in the AM on Weds, we wouldn't be able to get out of the state before our permit expires. So we decided to get our permits starting at 10 AM instead of at 8 AM. Breakfast is pick and bag. Very limited food for a $100+ hotel. I got yogurt, juice and a breakfast bar. Before it was time to leave the hotel, I ordered our permits. (My eyes are getting really bad in dim light) I need to read off VIN and other numbers to the permit person. Cruise worked all day today. :) Now someone has added a giraffe to the Loch Ness monster and shark. There was also a 'fish head' that wasn't set up yet. It's a long 40 miles on the last flats, these give us something to watch for. 1st stop was Wendover at the rest area. Restrooms were closed but the port-a-pottys were open. And the cleaning crew was keeping them 'clean.' Better, way better, than some places. We have a few minutes to kill before we could enter NV so we walked a little around the rest area. 2nd stop was for fuel and food (again.) BB needed fuel, we both needed food. Port-o-Subs. And we ate indoors again. Just west of Battle Mountain I noticed a portable office near the freeway. I have noticed them various places out west but usually can't see where the trucks go after the office. Today I could. Trucks were lined up taking supplies into a solar farm. This one looks like about 160 acers of panels. 3rd stop was in Winnemucca for fuel for me. This SHOULD be my final fuel. I have 325 miles to go so I wanted a range of 350. Surprise. I put in fuel and my range was 354. Usually when I guess on filling my fuel I end up being 50 miles over or under. Hopefully my range goes up heading down the mountains in CA. My excess range stays almost constant for the next 140 miles. Not much for transporters today. We did have two cargo vans pass us with OH plates, but I couldn't read the transport name or DOT#. Then at the Flying J, there were two Sprinter sized RV's. They had their plate and their placard in the front window. Usually the Maverick has the cheapest fuel, but not this week. Flying J is the cheapest, but the price went up from the time we left Winnemucca until we got here. A lot of the large stations update their prices online once an hour. Flying J was still the cheapest, but had gone up $.04. We would have saved about $6 if we had fueled in Wendover this AM. Or spent $10-20 more if we had just stopped at a random station somewhere. 4th and final stop is the Comfort Inn in Fernley. Food is from the Black Bear. This time I got my onion rings, but no ketchup. Last time I had ordered rings but got fries. Food is good. We haven't found any good places to park large vehicles in Reno so we stay on to the East. If we wanted to stay at a Ramada, there is a huge casino near downtown. I used to stay there when I was driving buses. It's a 20-30 floor hotel. If we are not stopping in Reno, then we stay at the Best Western in Verdi, but that is enough extra miles out of route that we don't do it for the Reno drops. BB can drop at 8 AM so we plan on being out of the hotel by 7 AM (local) The only trip from CA from yesterday is gone. It was going Las Vegas with a 2nd truck coming back to CA. Today the only CA run is one going to Phoenix. We will have to look at that one. It would be more inviting if tomorrow wasn't Thursday. IF we find out at noon that there will not be a bus, we could grab the truck right away and deliver it on Friday. If we don't find out on the buses until 3 PM, then it would be a Friday pickup and a Monday delivery. A one day run that takes us three days. Or we could head back to the beach :) Load board US - 348 IA - 162 MN - 3 WI - 8 The IA board keeps going up. And we keep watching it, from a distance. The best long runs are two no-tows to Las Vegas. But that would take us down I-80 again. To the southeast there are two to Lexington and five to Greer SC. The St Cloud MN from yesterday is gone, but now there is a Ramsey MN. Weather. We are should get over Donners Pass before the next storm. That will come in later in the day. And now there is a third one coming in. And it is cold. In MN the temps are -0- or below. Not real inviting to head right back. ... and I-80 is closed to high profile vehicles again. It doesn't really effect the cars directly, but the wind can blow around the other vehicles on the road. 210211 IA-CA 2 RV's, 1 to Reno NV, 1 to Davis CA (delivered) ... spending the night at Livermore CA We are both awake before the alarm goes off, that happens when you are two time zones from home. Breakfast is an apple, a muffin and a breakfast bar. Plus a short bottle of water. We pull out about 7:30. 25 miles on the freeway then less than ten on the city streets. BB stops to put in the final paid fuel and I go and find a place to park. I park in a strip mall parking lot adjacent to the RV dealer and then walk over and wait for BB. We have to wait a little for someone to come and check out / check in the RV. The whole thing takes an hour and we are ready to go. When we leave CA I still have an excess range of about 25 miles, same as when I fueled yesterday. 2nd stop is the rest area near Gold Run. I keep a close watch on my range the rest of the trip. 25 miles range can quickly disappear. 3rd stop is for fuel in Davis. My range has gone up to 39 miles by the time I fuel. This has been a rare happening. The range often either goes way way up or goes away. Fuel light comes on with a range of 50 miles. Two blocks down the street I park and BB walked across the street to pick up our rental car. It took a while as we were early and they needed to wash it before she could pick it up. I wait on the street this time, once she has the car we transfer our luggage before I deliver. Another block down the road and I am at delivery. We've been here many times, I know where to go. I park and go in to the office. The inspector we know is eating his lunch. I ask where he wants me to leave the paperwork and leave it with him. Because he is on lunch, we are here over an hour. But he finds no issues, we sign off and are ready to go. I call the bus dispatcher now and a few more times before I finally leave a message saying I will call back about 3 PM. We do our usual next stop at In-n-Out Burger. It is raining so we go through the drive thru then park and eat in their lot. Today we each get a single cheese burger and a drink. From here we head down to Livermore. About half way there I pull off and call dispatch again, this time he answers. No bus for me today. And all he will say is 'it depends on what they release tomorrow' about anything else. BUT he did mention that Monday is a holiday so they will be closed. So if we stay over the weekend it will be a three day weekend. And it is rainy weather so even less for us to do. We drive by the bus lot and there are a lot of buses. The only ones we remember are the two going to MN, but there were a lot of others. Then we see that the normal place they park buses is tore up. So it is hard to tell how many extra buses there actually were today. Final stop is the Quality Inn in Livermore. The price is right and we were headed here when we found out there would be no work. An hour plus later we order our food from BJ's and then go pick it up. When we are heading there we see lights from a cop car so we get over one lane, but then we realize the car is moving. Once we are closer we see it is following a car without lights and it has been dark for hours. At first we think it is escorting it off the freeway, but once on the city street it finally stops. After we pick up our food we see that the cop is finally showing the driver that his lights are out. Our food wasn't ready so we still had to wait for a while. I don't understand the covid regulations. The tents that most locations use are closed on all sides with no fans. How is that better than four walls with ventilation? I get chicken and noodles and BB gets a salad. Plus a cookie and ice cream. This place makes their own pop so I order both a Black Cherry and a Orange Cream soda. About four times as much liquid as I usually drink. When I ordered it I wasn't thinking of the fact they fill the cup half with ice. So what I don't drink will be watered down. But I drank one, and poured the other one into the empty cup without the ice. Neither was that good. Glad BB talked me out of getting the 64 oz size. Earlier today when I was driving I got a call from the RV dispatcher saying they had plenty of work. Ah ... yeh. And I am still on my last trip, almost 2,000 miles away. Looking at the weather, the only place that won't be an issue is right here. And south to the border. And we might be able to get to Phoenix. Earlier today they were checking for chains on I-80 at Donners Pass. Earlier today, I-80 was closed in WY to high profile vehicles. If we were going to go the south route, there are high winds in CA and snow by the time we get to NM. Right now the Weather Channel is talking about all the terrible weather than is happening NOW so I haven't seen a forecast. Load board US - 357 IA - 164 MN - 3 WI - 9 There are two runs in CA that might be interesting. But we can't pick up until Monday. The third one is down by LA heading to NM. IF, if we get a bus going to MN tomorrow ... we will take our chances and go the south route. If we went the north route, we would have to push it until about 10 PM to make it to Reno the 1st night. Donners pass is forecast to be closed Sat and Sun. Once we stop in Reno the storm would pass get ahead of us and we are unlikely to get in full days of driving until we get to IA. We are guessing this route would take at least two days longer than standard. If we go the south route we again may have to drive short days. If we can drive full days, this route adds four hours but the fuel and motels are less so money wise we would come out ahead. And likely come out ahead time wise as well. The high today at home was supposed to be -0-. We are in no rush to head home, just wish there was more to do out here. 210212 CA (waiting) ... spending the night at Livermore CA No work. We are wake long before daylight. When breakfast is open we head down. A nuke sandwich and diet yogurt are breakfast. BB eats leftovers from last night for breakfast. Closer to noon, I eat my last night leftovers and BB eats what she took and didn't eat for breakfast. We asked for a late checkout and got a 2 PM. That gives us one hour to kill before I call the local dispatcher. After sitting in the room all AM, when we leave we first drop off our last trips paperwork and then go to the mall to walk. Usually we walk around the outside of the mall area. Today when we got their we realized there was a short path across the street by a new strip mall area. The path is nice, but. But there isn't a lot of traffic and someone has taken up residence under one of the new picnic tables. So no the nicest area to walk. So after one trip around we walked through the new mall area. So far three food places are open. About 30 more are still empty. The walk was about 30 minutes but it was the first time we have done anything other than climb stairs in weeks. At 3 PM I call dispatch. No work. There are still 12 drivers in hotels and only two more buses again today. Company is closed Monday so we are looking at Tuesday at the earliest. More likely Weds or Thurs if the drivers in motels get the first buses. And that is if they suddenly start releasing 10 buses a day instead of two buses a day. We had all day and we didn't talk about what to do if no work. First we talk about heading out right now, but then we decide to stay in Livermore again tonight and decide by the AM where we want to go for 2-3 days. So back to the Quality Inn in Livermore. This time we are paying with rewards points. We are back up over 400,000 points. (Tonight is 12,000 points.) On the way there we stop at In-n-Out Burger for singles. We looked at the routes to take a bus if we had gotten one and on both routes there would be delays because of weather. So no matter what we do, we aren't going to be making much money. When we were out, we drove past the bus company. One of the MN buses was gone. But the HI one was still there. :) The only other buses we ID'ed were Spokane and KC. Load board US - 363 IA - 146 MN - 6 WI - 8 The trucks in CA that had been on the board were gone by noon and nothing new was added. IA added 15 (or more) new RV's. But we would have to get there. BB spent a lot of time today figuring out how wide of a window we would have in each state between storms. We would run into the same issues with either a bus or driving a car. Leaving here Sunday AM would give us a narrow window to get over the pass between storms. But at some point the next storm would catch up to us, likely WY and then we would be shut down until that one passes. We will need to look ahead at hotel prices before we decide where we are going. One place BB looked, two hotels were full and the 3rd in town was $300 a night. And there may be more people out at the places we want to go. But we have the weekend to think about it. 210213 OR-CA 1 truck to San Diego CA ... spending the night at Eureka CA Major change of plans. We had talked about moving trucks within CA but it wasn't until this AM that we looked at moving trucks TO CA. We have talked about it on previous trips but not this AM until BB brought it up. We looked at our options, the weather, the holiday and timing. I called in to dispatch and asked for phone numbers on two trips. The dispatcher I got said both locations were open on Monday so I went with the Portland trip. There was also a truck in Seattle but the weather was worse north of Portland. Now later, we realize that the extra time that the Seattle truck would have taken would have added an extra day to our trip. I had also wanted the phone number to find out what it was that I would be moving. Dispatch had the trip listed as 'truck,' but when I was talking to dispatch they asked if I towed, because this was a small van truck. So they know what I was going to move, they just didn't take the time to put that info on the load board. Once I got the paperwork emailed to me, I called the shipper ... and called ... and called. But the calls kept rolling to a corporate call center. One of the people at the call center even recognized me after a few calls. He went the extra mile and called other locations in the area and they were all closed. Likely because of the weather. The call center should have been notified but wasn't. Breakfast was the same as yesterday. Nuked sandwich and yogurt. So our vacation was on hold :) and we were back to work. We didn't rush, but we didn't waste any more time. We headed out. 1st stop was Walmart for water and juice. We usually go through a 32 pack of water every trip. Last trip was a short, so we didn't use the whole case and hadn't gotten a new. We usually don't buy water on the road. From there we headed west on I-80 and then north past I-80. Opps, we weren't thinking ahead. There are tolls on a few of the bridges one way. Usually out of town and we got to one of those tolls. No toll takers, your plate will be billed. Ouch. With a rental car, the rental company will charge a handling fee. Luckily with this company that charges is only $3.95 per day. We've rented from other companies that are twice that. But we had to choice once we saw the sign, we were past all the exits. There is a place in Santa Rosa we like to eat, but BB was looking at their website ... and they re-open tomorrow. And we were going to be there before noon today. Next time. 2nd stop was Cloverdale. BB just started looking for towns about a half hour ahead so that she'd have time to look at reviews before we got to the exit. Before we get to the place, we pass a drive-thru food truck area. I was driving so I didn't get a great look but it looked like 20 or so food trucks set up with one path past them. Maybe if we hadn't planned on the Deli. So food was from Eagles Nest Deli. We each got soup and a sandwich. I wanted a Rueben and that didn't come as a half a sandwich so I had to get a whole one. Plus soup. We each ate our soup and BB had a couple of bites of my sandwich for lunch. Then we split BB's 1/2 sandwich in the evening. That's how big they were. Good food. The temp today was around 60 degrees so it was nice to sit outside. This place had a few tables set out on the sidewalk but hardly any traffic walked past us. 3rd stop was an hour down the road at a Speedway in Ukiah. After I-580 ended/merged with US-101 the road went from three lanes each way, to two lanes each way, to one lane each way. But so far it has all been paved. :) For the last couple of hours the road went from 4 lanes to 2 lanes depending on the landscape. A lot of the 2 lane is very narrow and windy through the redwood trees. We didn't do any stops or site seeing today. Hopefully tomorrow. A lot of down trees along the road in places, I'm guessing they had a snow or ice storm that took them down. 4th and final stop is the Clarion in Euraka. Usually BB makes reservations ahead of time but the reviews for 'our brand' of hotels were bad enough that we wanted to look at them first. So we ended up making a reservation from the parking lot. And we had picked this location because it had laundry. And then once we were here and looked at their laundry area we decided to wait. The worst comments on this hotel was it was not in a good location. And it is not. A lot of street people walking around and the parking and and building have a fence around them. And it looked like the place has a few long term rentals. But the room and everywhere we have looked is clean. One of the interesting people was reading something as he was walking down the street. He seemed to take one slow step every paragraph or two of what he was reading. Very strange to walk. And others just seem to walk down the street as people drive around them. Weather - We are driving up US-101, 1st because we have time to see the sites. But later BB was watching the road conditions and on I-5, chains are required and we don't have any. US-101 looks good until we almost get up to Portland. If I-5 is open tomorrow we will get back on that if this road gets bad. Holiday - This was also a factor on which trips we took. We don't know if our permit company is open on Monday being a holiday. And most of the trucks would have required permits. I ended up taking a truck that would not require a permit. The trip is from Portland to San Diego, just over 1,000 miles. We have two days to get to Portland. Then we it will take us two days to get back down to San Diego, so I will have to call the bus dispatcher and tell him that I am now NA for Tuesday night. It will take Wednesday to get back up to Livermore. Which shouldn't be an issue with so many people in motels. If the weather had been better, we could have each gotten a truck. One from Seattle and one from Portland. I'm guessing they were both going to the same place. I'm not a fan of big cities, but this drop is about a mile off of I-5 on I-8 and then less than a mile from the exit off of I-8. If the bus dispatcher doesn't need us yet, we might just stay south for an extra day. Because we only got one truck, BB will follow me in the rental. We've got a good price on it. Better than we would get with a 2nd one way rental. Load board US - 345 IA - 139 MN - 2 WI - 8 We'll keep watching the load board and see what pays. We aren't going to get rich with this trip, but it will more than cover the hotels and rental car. And it is not below -0- here. ... the trip continues HERE |
