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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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221005 MN-MN 1 rental truck to Shakopee MN (delivered) 1 rental truck to Shakopee MN (Thursday) ... spending the night at Worthington MN We managed to get going early again, today at just after 7 AM. Light traffic, clear weather. We made it two plus hours before stopping. 1st stop is the rest area near Blue Earth. 2nd stop is the McDonalds in Luverne. 3rd stop is the shipper. I had called them from the rest area in Blue Earth so I knew the routine. My contact finds the keys and then leads me with their truck over to where the returns are parted. Papers get signed and they are gone. Then we do our inspection. When I notify dispatch that I have picked up, I request another trip from this same location. Tank is full of fuel with a range of 266 miles. Almost non-flight to the drop. I had to return a couple of calls. 4th stop was the drop. Things haven't changed much other than the help. In and out in the usual 15 minutes. 5th stop is the A&W in Mountain Lake. BB had thought she could wait to eat until Worthington but once she started looking at food she needed to eat ... now. A&W was the next food. This one had real root beer, not the vending machine stuff. One sip of that and ... it needs ice cream :) I got a small cheese burger, mini corn dogs and a malt. All good. BB got the root beer. 5th and final stop is the Comfort Inn in Worthington. There were still serving free drinks and food. I ate too many chips after eating all the food this evening. Load board US - 234 IA - 6/5 MN - 18 WI - 1 We are not sure about tomorrow. We will pick up about 9 AM and drop about noon. Then we have choices, we can come back and do two more. Or we might head to pick up a trash truck instead and get that delivered by Friday night. Either way we need to be back home to pick up meds on Friday or Saturday. Then we will head out again. 221006 MN-MN 1 rental truck to Shakopee MN (delivered) 1 rental truck to Shakopee MN ... spending the night at Worthington MN Rolling after 7 AM, to the shipper at 8 AM. This time I know the routine so the shipper did not escort me to the truck. When we pulled off the tar road, we met one of the trucks leaving. One of our drivers. 1st stop was the shipper. All works, truck full of fuel again. I call the trash truck dispatcher and get all the info on the Omaha trucks that have been sitting there a few days. They pay even more than I thought and have larger fuel tanks, so more fuel on board. And they are not cab overs, that will be a nice change. BUT as usual, I do not commit until I have dropped this one. Always hoping something even better will come up. Again today, dispatch calls with a question once I am rolling so I need to pull over and call him back. At this point today, BB is still behind me. 2nd stop is the drop. First I ask if they are open Saturday, they are. They are also open half a day on Sunday. This time I do get both Bills of Lading stamped. When I am parked, I look at my phone ... BB IS AN HOUR BEHIND ME ??? She took a wrong turn :( It's windy and chilly today so I walk to find a place to hide for a while. I try a couple of places and then I go inside to see if there is a waiting area ... Not thinking ... This is an Auction House. There is lots of place to sit and a cafeteria. The kitchen isn't open, they now park a food truck outside, but the tables are still inside. That is my home for the next hour. ... :( Both Omaha trucks are gone as are the rest of these MN trips.. Nothing good on the IA RV board. Finally BB calls, she is in the lot. I was watching but she comes in a different way than I expected. She is wound. Besides taking the wrong exit, she had a couple of other things happen on that route that wouldn't have happened on the four lane so that delayed her even more. I had planned on call a dispatcher as soon as I got in the car to set up our next run. But BB needed to let of some steam so we did the paperwork first and then ... The rental dispatcher calls us ... will we do one more truck from Beaver Creek? We haven't made other plans, so sure. Not sure if other trips would have paid better but this pays OK and they are asking. Not sure what happens behind the scenes but these trucks are on and off and back on the list. So we head back once more. Instead of having an hour to spare, we are now cutting it close to get to the shipper yet tonight. Dispatch had said by 4 PM but I have talked to the shipper and they are there until 5 PM. 3rd stop is the Kwik Trip in St Peter for food and a printer. But Kwik Trip will not print anything sent to them except via Fax. Not sure where to find a fax to send them a fax ??? But we did get food. No pork sandwich today. BB got a slice of pizza and I got a chicken salad sandwich. 4th stop is the Comfort Inn in Worthington to use their printer :) Last night it only took a couple of minutes. Today the screen is froze so I shut the computer off and re-boot. Still froze. So I go to the front desk for help. They give me their email to email it to and I do. Then BB says the computer is working so back I go. But I can't remember my password so back to the front desk. The email they have given me the first time is wrong, then I type it in the 2nd time wrong. Finally they get it and print out one of the two copies. They can't find the 2nd one and then the get a phone call. They do finally find the 2nd copy and get it printed. Thank you. All this and they don't even know I am not a current customer. :) Then a quick call to the shipper to confirm they will still be there at 5 PM. Yes. We go. 5th stop is the shipper, again. 4:55 and they close at 5 PM. No one in the office so I wait. I am just ready to call again when they come from another building. In about two minutes I am in and out. Whew. We get to where the trucks are parked and the driver from this AM pulls in behind us. (I didn't ask how he got behind us when we lost an hour plus today.) We did talk to him some. The rental dispatcher has been running him non-stop for the last five weeks. That is why very little around here has been showing up on the load list, this guy has been doing them all. Nice to know, I guess. When dispatch had called us to do one, this guy got the other two. Says he told dispatch that we could have another. He is ready to head home. This truck is not full of fuel but I should, should be able to get to the drop with it still at 1/4 based on the last two trucks. This one has a couple of issues. One is the right mirror control does not work. The other is that the cruise setting is off about 2-3 mph from actual speed. 6th stop is back to the Comfort Inn. Now we are a customer :) Same room tonight. Then we headed to the Blue Line truckstop cafe. Good food. Lots of it. Too bad they were out of the two 'specials of the day' that I wanted. Swedish meatballs and chicken linguine. Instead I got meat loaf. BB got breakfast. Same thing on paper as the last time she ordered it at Perkins but way more food here. Did see one guy eating what looked like Swedish meatballs, the guy ate less than half. It was a lot of food. We did take the last of both to go. Load board US - 215 IA - 2/1 MN - 9 Tomorrow we drop about 10 AM and head home ... as of now anyways. BB does not want to do another of these trips if offered. We can sit at home and hit re-fresh the rest of the day. As of now, there are still three short trash truck runs on the load board. None will pay as good as the Omaha but they are all one day trips. We will see how it goes. RV's are priority if any show up that make us money.
221007 MN-MN 1 rental truck to Shakopee MN (delivered) ... spending the night at home Breakfast was last nights leftovers. Then as we were leaving, BB checked and they had bacon for breakfast :( Same route, nothing new. ... but pulling out of the first town I had to slow down for ... I kept up to traffic, set my cruise and then looked down to see what I had set it at ... 74 mph!!! In a 65 mph zone. But my speedometer still showed 55 mph. Flipping through the screen settings, I found the digital speedometer ... 74 mph. The mechanical speedometer stay about 20 mph off for the next two hours. Then when we got to stop lights somewhere again, the digital matched the mechanical again for the rest of the trip. No idea. Fuel, this truck was no on full when I picked it up yesterday but it was full enough that I still had 3/8 when I got to delivery. 1st stop (no phone calls today) was the drop in Shakopee. This time there was a semi ahead of me in line. I had to get out of his way and as I did, a <> taxi almost backed into me. Because they wanted me out of the semi's way, I had to come through the gate at a bad angle. But I made it without hitting anything. The person directing the semi was the same guard as yesterday. There were two checking me in today. One training and the other learning. It sounded almost like this was the first vehicle they were checking in today. Detailed, no comparing it to the 'prior car.' It was only slightly raining when I was parking and leaving the lot. BB messaged me just as I was parking. It was raining today, so that is the end of the run of great weather the farmers were having for harvesting. Lots of combines out, huge wagons or semi's lining the fields. Still lots to go. Once I called dispatch and got my release number ... we played with our phones for a while. Dispatch had said the pictures we send to his emails are huge. So I was thinking the pictures of paperwork BB was sending to his email was huge. Then by the time we finally found a work around, I remembered that BB was sending them as a PDF, that the picture was inside the PDF so this was not an issue. Lots of time to kill? We also talked about trips and the math doesn't really work great. Just one of us driving. But at this point we also need to be comparing it to sitting at home. Some money coming in, or no money coming it. ... I think we did make 4x as much doing local this week than if we had taken the to RV's to MT. But no more local right now. Just one in ND coming back to MN. 2nd stop is Bo Diddley's in Eden Prairie. We don't have one of the major deli chains in our town. This one was good, the cashier was an Ausi so we needed help communicating. Aussie. Food was good, deli is in a very small indoor mall. We keep watching the load board. We do the math on all the trips and the numbers are close enough, we even line up a rental car for the week. Then we decide to wait until 4:30 again ... unless two RV's show up. RV's do show up near 4 PM. But we decide to do our math first, we need to find a cheap rental car that makes the trip worth it. At one point I even had the phone in my hand to call. But as we did the math, that trip would disappear. (It's been years since we put a trip on hold so we could do the math) Then the 2nd pair disappear. So we are back to working local, there were still three left ... but in just a few minutes while we worked on the RV's ... all three of the local trash truck trips are gone. And only those three. Even the rental truck in ND is gone. So now we are home for the weekend and beyond ??? Not our plan. On Tuesday when we were in WI, I had seen a tanker truck in transport. I remember picking one up near there years ago but couldn't remember where it was. I even thought I might (remember to) ask the drop who the shipper was. But that didn't happen. Today there are two tankers out of that shipper. But the trips are too many miles to chase and not enough money to just run one trip and get a rental car. Also that day I saw the potato farmers on a different field. I had seen the same farmers out when we went to Omro. That day they were digging potatoes and dumping them on the ground. It looked like a machine just for that. At the time I couldn't remember why they did it that way. Later I remembered that they do that to open the field so the trucks have somewhere to drive without making smashed potatoes. Load board US - 218 IA - 1/0 (we assume they removed the last of the RV's so they could have another weekend off) MN - 9 WI - 12 221008 MN US load board during the day 7 AM - 222 7:30 - 217 8:00 - 215
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