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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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221010 MN-IL 1 trash truck to Bloomington IL ... spending the night at Davenport IA (Spent the night doing math trying to find something that pays enough to keep moving. We are using a rental car this week) (written up one day later) Nothing looks good on the load board so at 8:30 I call the local dispatch. They answered. Two weeks ago it was late afternoon before I could get ahold of someone. And they also have a trip, ready now. They had tried to move it last week but the drop was going to be on vacation and no one else can sign. Now it's mine. 'Down side' is that they close at 2 PM. Not an issue, by the time we get going we will not be to the drop during 'normal business hours' and no matter when we got going this would not be a one day trip. I'll pick up the paperwork in an hour and half. 1st stop is the rental car place to pick up a rental car. We don't want to keep putting miles on our personal car and the price of this car is as good as it gets. 2nd stop is dispatch. When we looked at the parking lot yesterday there were eight buses, four dump trucks, a few other trucks including a trash truck. So we thought MAYBE my truck was at the office. No, that truck was gone. Some of the other trucks/buses were still there. 3rd stop is back home to drop our car and move our stuff to the rental. 4th stop is at the shipper. All is good, no issues. No other drivers there at this time today. I've eaten breakfast today so I don't plan on eating lunch. BB did not eat breakfast so she will stop in Rochester for food. We likely won't see each other until a rest area near Davenport. There we will need to decide how long of day it will be. 5th <> stop is Chester IA. The only real business in this town is a truck stop and I didn't realize it until I was passing. So I stop just past town to make a phone call to the drop. They do not pick up so I leave a message. The 1st number on my paperwork rang forever and then hung up. So I called dispatch back, they tell me which number they have been using. I have two numbers on my carrier paperwork and one number on the shippers paperwork. The last four digits of the phone number are the same three numerals, just in different orders. Looks like typo's. 6th stop is the rest area near Walcott. I am there before BB about five minutes. We decide on the Comfort Inn in Davenport. Never stayed there before. 7th stop is the Comfort Inn in Davenport, 17 miles down the road. When we check in, we ask about the 'Shed,' and ask if the food is still good. It used to be a Machine Shed years ago when I ate there but since then the hotel has changed names and gone down hill to where now it is a mom and pop place with what looks like some long term renters. But even though the road sign now only says 'Shed' and the blue sign on the interstate says 'I-80 Shed,' everything inside says Machine Shed. The place is packed, at first they said we would have a wait, but then seated us almost right away. Way too much food. Good service. Load board US - 231 IA - 15 MN - 12 WI - 9 221011 MN-IL 1 trash truck to Bloomington IL (delivered) 1 roll-off truck to Hopkins MN (Wednesday) ... spending the night at Rensselaer IN Breakfast is going to be leftovers from last night. This fridge works, the meatloaf is frozen solid. So I need to go down and get a paper plate so I can nuke the food, we brought it home in a styrofoam container. Enough out of normal things this AM so we do not get going at 7:30. We still do not have a plan for the next leg. 1st stop is across the street at the Flying J for fuel. I put in 30 gallons and as I am pulling out I think I should have put in 50? 30 gallons was the right math, not sure where the 50 gallons came from. But I should have put in a little more as the gauge was under 1/4 by the time I got to the hotel last night. Rain. Not much going on in the fields today. And lots of work left to be done in this area. One scale yesterday, one scale crossing today. I do not get flagged in. My fuel gauge is just about to 1/4 as I am getting close to Bloomington ... I have memorized the route in so I did not write anything down :) It is a few more miles but all I have to do is take a freeway exit, a left and the a right into the drop lot. 2nd stop is the drop. I follow a mechanic into the shop and he locates my contact for me. It's raining so the inspection is done outside and the paperwork is done inside. Nothing on the load board has changed since yesterday with all trips losing us money. So ... I call the local dispatcher to see what else they have. The have a truck coming back to the cities (home) about three hours from where I am. Miles wise it is the best option so we take it. BUT ... because of how this company pays, doing back to back trips does not pay as well as matching a solo trip with them to trips with other companies. That is they way it has always been, I just haven't done back to back trips for them without a 'home' night between for a while. 3rd stop is the Steak and Shake here in Bloomington. We eat inside, the shipper closes at 2 PM eastern/ 1 PM central and it was noon when we were talking to dispatch. No way it would happen same day. Not too far down the road, a trip from Indy back home shows up. The time to get to the truck would have been about the same, but we would have been on all freeway and the paid miles would have been more. Timing. Glad we just didn't commit to one of the short ones just for $$ to get us back home. This is a cross country trip, after a few miles we are off the freeway. Roads go from bad to worse. The surface in most cases was not bad, just narrower. Until we were down to 5 ton roads with no center line. Gravel in spots, tared in others. Not sure how fast Google thinks people are going to drive on these roads but it took us a lot longer. Off the freeway it seemed more fields were not combined than were combined. And it is raining. Away from the big cities, there is not much for chain hotels. There were a couple of cheaper hotels but they would add miles to the trip. We had the time but decided against a 'cheaper hotel' and stopped an hour short of the shipper. Looking at the paperwork now, in the hotel, we see that we can do an after hours' pickup. Dispatch had said during business hours only. And that email had ended up in the junk folder so we did not see it until way after hours. We also see that it is not the same shipper I picked up from last time. Last time I picked up there I wrote that 'nothing looked as I remembered it.' It wasn't the same place, it shouldn't have. 4th stop is the Comfort Inn in Rensselaer. This place allows check in's at 2 PM so we can check in when we get here. So tonight we have lots of hotel time, it's raining so no walking. Later we go a couple of miles down the street to a Mexican grocery. BB had seen on line that there is also a restaurant there and has to as the checkout clerk. They hand her a menu. We order food to go. Good and lots. La Fiesta. When we come back to the hotel, we stop at the front desk to pick up my paperwork from the email I had forwarded to them earlier. Opps ... I hadn't looked at it. Dispatch usually sends me one page. This dispatcher sent me 8 pages. I don't need it, I don't look at it, I have extra's of everything except the main page. Glad the hotel is not charging me for it. Load board US - 280 IA - 13/11 MN - 17 WI - 8 Tomorrow ... It is about an hour to the shipper. Then 500 miles home so IF we make it home, it will be a long day. 221012 IN-MN 1 roll-off truck to Hopkins MN ... spending the night at home Detour Tornado Long day -------------------------- (one day later) Breakfast today was one small carton of yogurt. Travel was mostly on roads with dividing lines but a few miles were the one lane blacktop kind. 1st stop - The shipper in Winamac. This looks like the one I remember. No one at the front office door, just a phone and bunch of signs. Someone picks up when I call and I am directed where to go. Their office is the 'scale house' in the middle of a big storage lot. They sign, I sign. My truck is directly across from the office. We do the inspection. All is good. The truck has enough fuel to get to a truckstop so I will not need to fuel here in town. Down the road we get to a 'road closed' sign. I remember that when I looked at the maps last night, I had showed BB that there were three options to get out of Winamac and none of them took this road. That helps me make a snap choice, I make the turn without hitting anything but it was a 'last minute turn.' This one was no big deal, we are just going around two different sides of a square. This is roughly the route I had looked at yesterday. And this route has no towns to slow us down. It did make me nervous that there was not a single detour sign after we turned down that road. I just watched for a good road ... and then the detour road was closed so we had to turn. 2nd stop - Valparaiso - Pilot - for fuel. At this point the truck showed I was getting close to 8 mpg so I expected the mpg to go up over the next 500 miles. From here on, it should be four lane and then freeway all the way home. 'Ramp closed' :( The ramp to get on I-65 was closed with no marked detour. So I kept going on US-30, looking for a major highway or a name I have seen before. BB has been following me but just as she gets over in the left lane, we come to US-41. I would have taken it but she is now in the lead so I'm thinking she has turned on the GPS. Nope, she pulls into the next turn and we park. We look at maps. We do want US-41 and off we go. Off I go, the stoplight and traffic only let one person, me, through. That is the last I see of her until our next arranged stop. When I get to the freeway, there are more 'road closed' signs. But then I see that it is the ramp to I-80/94 East that is closed. We are heading west. West bound traffic is moving well over the posted. This is the one town I do not dare to drive the speed limit in construction zones. And there are lots of those. Oncoming traffic, those heading east bound were pretty much backed up for the whole <> 10 miles I was on I-80. Stop and go, four plus lanes wide. 3rd stop is the Loves in Hampshire. BB is not there yet. I would have saved time if I had just ordered right away, but I waited for her. And waited. And when she gets there she is wound. She thought we were going east, even though the GPS was telling her west. So she passes I-80/94. The road she is on becomes a city street and the area starts to look less friendly. I haven't looked but I'm guessing it is about five miles of stoplights between the freeways. And traffic on through downtown Chicago was even worse. But I she found out the view from the high bridge is nice. We order, we eat, we talk. We lost about an hour of travel time because of the road closures. Now we are up against nightfall getting home. WI scale is closed. 4th stop is Black River Falls at the rest area. BB is here before I. We decide to get home tonight. It will be sunset. At noon, I thought we would be crossing the MN/IA border at sunset. We are running 10 minutes late but it is still light enough to do my post trip inspection. At noon, BB says when she saw the storm coming in, she was hoping a tornado would not top off her day. Tonight I hear that there were 3 tornado's in WI from that storm. Food ... we have only eaten once today and now it is after 7 PM. First we try Bub's, and we watch them shut off the lights inside. Next we try Culver's, but even after 7 PM on a weeknight there is a long line at the drive thru, we have found if the drive thru is busy, so is the inside counter. We end up at Noodles. Short night, but in our own bed. Load board US - 191 IA - 19/17 MN - 16 WI -7
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