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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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220325 MN-IN 1 straight truck heading to IN (Sunday) 1 straight truck heading to WI (Monday) ... spending the night at home Breakfast - cold eggs and long sausages. And good yogurt. We got up on time but left the hotel later than usual. I did call a dispatcher in IN about a trip, the trip is a 'cube truck.' A small box truck. It is listed as an 'other' on our load board. We leave out about 8:30 (instead of 7:30) Nothing has shown up on the load board for MN so we are likely heading straight home. 1st stop is in Floyd at the BP for fuel (gift cards) First I call my local dispatcher and line up the IN trip. I hold off on committing to a 2nd one until after this one is delivered. Then I call the dispatcher who has the 'other' truck and line that up to pick up on Monday. It is about 10 miles from my drop. Dispatcher seemed very glad I would take it. (It looks like it is about 30 miles from the airport) ... BB ends up fueling the car as I have been making phone calls. When she is done fueling she pushes the button for a receipt. She turns away and then back and the receipt is blowing across the parking lot. She chases it until it lands in a mud puddle. Then she goes in and gets a duplicate. Once we have worked lined up, BB lines up another rental car. It is cheaper to return this car and rent one from a different agency for the next week. We looked at doing a one way to drop in IA but because of the price we will return to MN and switch cars before heading out. Later today there will be another trip from IN heading our home direction but I will not commit to anything else until I am in a 2nd truck. Lots of wind today, mileage is closer to 20 mpg than 40 mpg. Rain and snow today depending on where you are. We see a few RV's, then cement mixers, trash trucks and cement pumpers. Transporters are busy. 2nd stop is the clinic. All is good, need to stop back in eight weeks. Then off to Smash Burger. My Sin City Burger is no longer on their computer, but one person knows how to ring it up. Standard burger, with onion strings and an egg. We eat in the car, the burger is too sloppy to eat and drive. 3rd stop is the grocery store. 4th stop is home. After doing some paperwork I head to the local dispatch office. The first thing I do is check my paperwork for my next trip. While I am in the entryway looking at my paperwork, the senior dispatcher finds me. She will have two buses for me next week ... I tell her that I am heading to IN, maybe twice. But buses trump trucks so I may be doing a bus if they are ready. The bus I tried to pick up last week still is not ready. ... and for the first time in 14 years, quarter end on the buses will be the 1st Sunday of the fourth month instead of the last Sunday of the third month. I thought all bus drivers would be looking for work next week, no, they will still be delivering buses. As the dispatcher and I are talking she looks at the other drivers paperwork and realizes that there are no keys in his packet. Not a good thing to find on a Sunday morning. When I get out to look at my truck I find that mine is blocked in, how was I supposed to get out? So I talked to dispatch again, I end up moving the truck in the way and starting both trucks that will leave on Sunday. There are 10 total trucks parked there today, two will leave Sunday. I'm guessing this is a 'sweet-heart deal' where the trucks only move if there are drivers to move them. Glad I stopped in. :) Load board US - 551 IA - 352/349 Plan is drop the 1st rental and pick up the 2nd rental tomorrow. Then early Sunday we will head out to IN with the truck, we should be within an hour of the drop for the night. LOG (like) 8:30 - Waterloo IA - Comfort Inn - leave hotel 10:00 - Floyd IA - BP - fuel 12:30 - Burnsville MN - Smash Burger - eat 2:00 - St Paul MN - home 3:30 - Lake Elmo MN - drop paperwork 220326 MN-IN 1 straight truck heading to IN (Sunday) 1 straight truck heading to WI (Monday) ... spending the night at home Today's work was just dropping off one car and picking up the other a few miles away. We dropped off a white Toyota Camry and I thought maybe our next one would be also but we got a Honda instead. Load board US - 532 IA - 336/333 Plan is to leave out tomorrow at our usual time and be near the drop for tomorrow nights hotel. 220327 MN-IN 1 straight truck heading to IN 1 straight truck heading to WI (Monday) ... spending the night at Elkhart IN We leave out at our usual 7:30, today without breakfast. 1st stop is the office to pick up my truck. One of the shuttle vans are gone so they are taking drivers somewhere to head out today. The other driver going to Elkhart has not left. There is also one bus going to Rock Island (that they did not ask me about) and paperwork for another Carol Stream trash truck. There is other paperwork but I did not look at that. No issue with the truck. Other than it is cold this AM. My hands freeze in the few minutes it takes to tape one placard on and I sit in the cab to warm up before putting the other placard on. Today's truck is a little cabover and I can check the tranny fluid without flipping the cab up but not the engine oil on this one. So I get to do the flip. No issue, just a pain. After I start my truck I pull ahead so I can get better pictures of the truck, then forget to take those pictures until I am on the side street. So I stop there and take my four pictures. The fuel tank is almost full but this is a small truck so it has a small tank. I have no idea how far I will get when I start out today. BB stops after an hour at the rest area in Menomonie. 2nd stop - We both stop at the rest area near Black River Falls. Once my fuel started dropping I had not planned on stopping here, but then I realized that I had never checked under the fuel cap to see which size nozzle it would take. So I stopped here and checked. It will take the big nozzle so I can stop at Pilot. I am just pulling out as BB is pulling in. I do not see her, but she sees me 3rd stop is at the Pilot in Mauston for fuel. When I pull in all fuel islands are full and all but one does not have someone waiting. I pick that line. By the time I fuel, no one is waiting and at least one is empty. Timing. BB does not stop here. 4th stop - Culvers in De Forest. BB has gotten there ahead of me. The parking lot is full but the drive thru is going fast ? Not sure where all the people are, there was no line waiting to order. As we were waiting, we saw a couple of people come back because their order was short. Sounds familiar. Arby's across the street from Culvers is almost empty. Culver's really has a local following and we are one of those. No treats for us today, someone had left some really good brownies and cookies at our house besides the Girl Scout cookies we are not done with. So we have treats. I had ordered both a cup of chili and a cup of soup. I got a small and one was still too much. It is cold enough today that we put the soup in the trunk for later. BB pulls off at the next exit to get some of the cheap Fleet Farm fuel. 5th stop is the TA in Hampshire for fuel. The fuel pumps pump so fast that it is kicking off all the time. Because it is always doing it, I do not know when it is full so I top it off good. I figure I got 240 miles on the first fill and it was below the 1/4 needed left in the truck so by fueling in Hampshire it is 210 miles so I hope I do not need to add more before delivery. BB pulls in a couple of minutes behind me. I fuel and then back out as the person ahead of me hasn't left yet and I want to get to the car lot. I park and go in and get a receipt. Not sure what was going on but the pump would not take my rewards card so I had to give up those $.12 today. Not worth walking in to prepay for. I suggest BB make a hotel reservation now but she wants to follow me through Chicago and stop at the oasis on the IN side. Not bad traffic, I just drive a little faster through the work zones than anywhere else in the country. It seems like everyone else is still going twice as fast as me. 6th stop is the Portage rest area. We park next to another transporter. They are driving a lumber delivery truck, we do not see the driver so no chance to talk to them. We decide on the Sleep Inn, it is across the street from the Cracker Barrell. 7th and final stop is the Sleep Inn in Elkhart, we will be about five miles from my drop. We are dropping it at another transport company ??? Everyone is short of drivers? As soon as we check in we order online at Cracker Barrell. Later we walk over, because of the layout of the roads it was a lot faster to walk than drive. TOMORROW - We are going to work on East Coast time to give ourselves an extra hour of daylight. About 8 AM we will drop. By 9 AM we should have picked up the next truck By 1 PM we should have delivered By 6 PM we could be home? We will see how close those numbers are. ... by mid-afternoon we should know what we are going to do on Tuesday. 220328 IN-WI 1 straight truck heading to IN (delivered) 1 straight truck heading to WI (delivered) 1 trash truck heading to Lake Elmo (staging-Tuesday) 1 straight truck heading to IN (Tuesday) ... spending the night at Rochester MN Breakfast - only the juice was out, everything else had to be handed to us by the desk clerk. BB wanted a sandwich to nuke, so they gave us one for each of us. I took a Pop-Tart for later. In the room I ate my potato soup from yesterday, still good. Sleep Inn, big buck place and the rooms had no micro-waves. We had to go back down to the breakfast area to nuke our stuff, luckily it was a quiet AM as they only had two microwaves and one was quite dirty. BB hadn't slept well last night so we were slow getting going this AM. We are running about 15 minutes late getting going, but we are only a few miles from the drop so we didn't have to wait for them to open. BB leads with the GPS, we will go a different way next time. The road was worse than the speed bumps and the trees were not trimmed for trucks. 1st stop was the drop - Brand new place, the dozer was still doing work between the street and their building. I parked in the entry drive and walked inside. This place still had a 'masks' sign so I put mine on. It took a couple of minutes for someone to pay attention to me, there is no receptionist, I was walking into an office full of cubes. I told them I had a truck, they guessed correctly which kind and told me where to park it and bring the paperwork and the keys back in. But by the time I got back to my truck, someone was walking my way so I waited. They said for me to grab my stuff (I already had) and that they would sign for it. They just walked around it once and signed. Glad they took it from here as this lot is packed. Acres of trucks parked 2-3 deep with narrow trails between them. I think this is the lot that a driver was telling me about when we were down in Greer a few weeks ago. From here it was nine miles of city streets to the pick up location. 2nd stop was the shipper. The first building I went to said 'No vendors, drivers, applicants ... go to building #2." So I went to the next building, nowhere did it say office or building #2. Finally someone outside smoking a cigarette asked if they could help. Then they sent me back to where I had been ... 'knock loudly and someone will open the door." I did and someone came, they asked if I was with (my company) and told me where the trucks were parked. This place is 'grab and go.' Keys are in the trucks and they do not sign any paperwork. Here there is only a dozen trucks and we find me right away. Dispatch was right, the gauge is showing 'E,' so I do not start the truck until I am ready to drop it in gear. It is frosty this AM but it comes off quickly with the washer fluid. We do make it to the gas station a mile away without running out of fuel. I do not want to leave more fuel than I have to so I guessed I would not make more than 20 mpg so I put in 10 gallons for the 200 mile trip. This truck looked pretty stripped down so I did not look too far for digital info in the dash. It showed the truck had been driven three miles and how many hours and the quality of the oil. That was all I could find to start with. Once we got on the interstate I had more time to look and found that there was a range, it was 188 miles after I fueled. It would have been nice to know before I fueled but I hadn't looked that hard. When we get to the exit toll booth for IN I notice that the arm has been broken off, I guess someone decided they were not going to pay no toll. 3rd stop as the Flying J in Lake Station. There is an RV at the next fuel island but they pull out before I am done fueling. This is a busy place without a lot of pumps so I didn't want to be blocking a pump was someone else is waiting. I think I have a better idea on the mileage so I add another five gallons. When I go in to use the restroom I can see the diesel fuel pumps (mine is a gas, so I fuel with the cars,) there is a bus at those pumps. So when I am done inside, I head outside to look at the bus and find a driver. No driver but I do take a picture of the bus. Someone walking out of the building sees me taking a picture and says hi, when we cross paths, but they are on the phone so I don't say anymore. When I get to the building I look back and that person is walking to the bus. This is a Chicago bus from NY, one I hope to drive some day. There was one truck going just over the speed limit today and I mostly followed them all the way through Chicago. Most other drivers are 10-20 mph over the speed-limit. One place I was going to change lanes because I thought my lane was ending and I checked my mirrors, no one for a mile ... but when I started moving over someone doing about 30 mph over the limit almost clipped me. They had come from the left lane to pass a truck on the right most lane. And a few feet ahead was a cop but I have no idea where that car went but the cop didn't go after them. Not sure what the 'chase speed' is here. 4th stop is the Kwik Trip in Pleasant Prairie for more fuel. The low fuel light comes on at a range of 70 miles. I lost the range shortly after that and I still had 45 miles to go. 30 miles to go from the fuel station. So I think I am getting less than the 20 mpg, less than the 15 mpg I had used at Lake Station. So I go with 10 mpg and add five gallons. I get back in my truck and I have a range of over 100 miles. ??? As I usually do, I roll my window down when I leave my truck running when I get out. For this short trip I had put my placard in my side window. When I was done fueling I (luckily) noticed that my placard was gone. I looked in the truck, then under the truck then around the parking lot. Finally found it under the rear of my truck. I was able to grab it, no damage done this time. From here it is mostly side roads, All I know is it is WI-20 and just before the next stop light. 5th stop was the drop. It is 12:30. I find someone who knows who to call. Shortly I see someone wondering around the parking lot but they do not look like who I was expecting. But shortly they come to where I was standing as as the person I had talked to where the driver (me) was. Here also they just do a quick walk around and sign and I am ready to go. I had called dispatch this AM that I had dropped their truck and I would call back later. Later was going to be after I dropped the 2nd truck, but while I was waiting to get signed here dispatch called me ... I let it go to voice mail. Now I listen to the message, they want me to grab a truck and bring it back to the lot on my way back. When I called them, we agreed to do it (more on that later) Then I talk to the other dispatchers and one wants me to do a truck tomorrow and the other wants me to do a bus on Thursday/Friday ... and I wanted to do a 2nd truck from IN back to WI next trip. So we are heading to Dodge Center, spending the night in Rochester because I will be out of hours before we would get that truck back to the office. 6th stop is the Pilot in Mauston. BB is good at wanting a rest area a mile after we pass one, peripheral vision? Then she decides she is also hungry so when we are done at Pilot we head to the Log Cabin Deli. Today's special is gyro's, so that is what we get. It is 3 PM and all we have had during the day is cookies. At some point we re-hash our up coming trips. This Dodge Center trip hopefully will pay enough to cover tonight's hotel, if we had gone straight home we would not have had a hotel tonight. And this Dodge Center trip is going to delay us a few hours so that we will not be delivering first thing in the AM in Indiana and IF we do the Wausau trip we may not be able to get the bus delivered on Friday. I had already told them a few times that I was not planning on working after Thursday. Now we are looking at working for them on Friday, maybe Saturday depending on what the drop will accept. The other issue with this situation is I won't know if the bus is complete until after I need to leave IN. What the shipper says is going to ship is not always what does ship, some times they are off by 50%. Not sure how we will handle this yet. We are still hoping to head to CA this weekend. 7th and final stop is the Sleep Inn in Rochester. We do go for a short walk around the block, all paved sidewalks. Load board US - 550 IA - 346/344 Yesterdays forecast About 8 AM we will drop. (YES) By 9 AM we should have picked up the next truck (YES) By 1 PM we should have delivered (YES) By 6 PM we could be home? (no, we were in Rochester by 5 PM) Tomorrows forecast 8 AM - pick up at Dodge Center 12 noon - pick up at Lake Elmo 5 PM - shut down at Rockford
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