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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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210830 MN-MN 1 trash truck to Burnsville (Wednesday) ... spending the night at home Local dispatch called me. It is less than a 100 mile run. I told them I could do it if it could wait until Wednesday, no problem so Wednesday it will be. I hope it doesn't mess up my working any other trips. There are none at the moment but this will be about five hours out of our day. I also got messages from my long haul company that I haven't worked for 30 days. Load board US - 289 IA - 161 MN - 15 210831 MN-MN 1 trash truck to Burnsville (Wednesday) ... spending the night at home Load board US - 319 IA - 182 MN - 8 WI - 5 210901 MN-MN 1 trash truck to Burnsville (delivered) 1 RV to Greenfield WI ... spending the night at Mauston WI Our usual routine this AM, alarm at 6 AM, rolling by 7:30. Office opens by 8 AM so that was when we got there. I went up to see dispatch and they motioned that the paperwork was by the door. OPPS ... it never crossed my mind. I could have picked up my paperwork on the way home last night and been leaving for the shipper at 7:30 instead of heading to the office. Hopefully it doesn't end up being critical time. 1st stop - Dodge Center at the shipper. I know the routine, and today it says on the keys that the truck is blue and the customer name, which ends up being on the truck. There are four to choose from :) Makes it much easier. In and out in a half hour. No issues, no damage. 3/4 of a tank of fuel to go 70 miles, so no stops. 2nd stop - Mack dealer in Burnsville. I 'know' where stuff is so I never looked at a map. It wasn't until I was looking at the International dealer that I realized I was thinking of the wrong place. Mack was across the street and I don't think I have ever been here before. I parked and someone walked over right away ... and asked me to move. So I did and then went inside. Someone was able to help me right away so we walked back out to do the inspection. He'd done them before but didn't seem to sure of himself so I walked back in to the office with him while he asked someone else if we had covered everything. We had. Then when I am still sitting in the parking lot the same guy walks over and asks if I have the keys. Nope. He had taken them out and laid them on the seat ... so he went and got them. I sat there until I saw he had them. At pickup I had tried to call the long haul dispatcher for this same shipper but all I got was a busy signal. So I tried again from the drop, now at least I got his voicemail. 3rd stop is Honey Baked Ham for lunch. I try calling the dispatcher a few more times. Finally as I am pulling on the freeway his wife calls back so I pull to the shoulder. I find out the pay and say thank you. The pay on the truck to Grand Forks is about the same as the pay on the RV to Milwaukee. There had been two WI trips that would have worked with the Milwaukee trip but they are gone by the time I had dropped. I do not like to get too far ahead of myself on committing to trips. Some drivers like to have a week lined up ahead of time. Right now I am down to a few hours ahead of time. As in this trip. We are heading in the direction of two shippers and still do not know which trip we are going to take. 4th stop - McDonald's parking lot in Medford to make phone calls. 1st I call my local dispatcher to see if there is any work coming out of the Fargo/Grand Forks area. No, the 30 trucks they had to move last month all made delivery so a couple of days too late. So I decide to go with the RV, much nicer ride and it pays about the same and I will only be about 20 miles further from home. By now we are less than a half hour from the closer shipper so it was time to decide. 5th stop - Shipper to pick up the RV. The lot looks like it has the 200 RV's in it, it is full. No issues, in and out in 30 minutes. Then a quick stop down the street at Kwik Star/Trip to put in 13 gallons of fuel. BB did the math on this one for me, we will see how close I get. I would have likely put in 5-10 gallons to see how far that would get me. After I fueled, my range was still 90 miles short. By the time we stopped for the night I was seven miles over with another 120 mile to gain more range. 6th stop - Jimmy Johns in La Crosse. Even with my morning opps, we are still running ahead of what we had estimated. So we stop and eat and then in summer months we drive for another hour. 7th and final stop is at the Quality Inn in Mauston. Still using rewards points. We have now dropped below 400,000 points and tonight's stay is another 16,000 off of that. We still have a ways to go to use them up. We check in and then go for a walk. Desk clerk commented that it looked like we had had a long day ... we didn't tell them that we always look like this :) We start to walk around the parking lot and then see a street in the distance. Then we see the sidewalk. It is on the other side of someone's bean field but we walk through the head high ragweed on a little trail and get to the sidewalk. It looks like the road used to go right past our hotel but was moved to get it further away from the freeway entrance. I'm guessing we walked for about 45 minutes. sidewalk on one side of the street, corn fields on the other. Load board US - 318 IA - 173 MN - 14 WI - 8 120 miles to the drop and then, as of now we will be dead heading home. We did look at doing two RV's to this drop but the rental car would have cost more than we would have made and it would have added another four hours to our trip home. We are done with medical appointments for now so we will be trying to work a day or two every week. But we are still looking at another month or two before we are back on the road full time. With rental car prices still up there I don't think we would be going too far even if we could. |
