To The Limit in Kentucky

I woke up after my dark and stormy night in West Memphis and drove under clear, brisk skies 50 miles to the east of Memphis to deliver my Eggos to Kellogg in Rossville, Tennessee. The last few miles were through an absolutely delightful part of the country that was largely wooded but also interspersed with open pastures and picturesque homesteads and churchyards. I could live here, I thought.

Just a couple of blocks off the state highway, stood the large Kellogg complex. The people were nice enough although it was still a three-plus hour experience. On one of my visits to the shipping & receiving office, I mentioned to the clerk at the window how nice it must be to be able to have this decent place to work so close to where I imagined she lived, that is, nearby.

“Oh, I drive an hour to get here,” she replied.  Go figure.

After unloading, I was quickly assigned a load down in Mississippi. It was a two hour drive and I got there at dusk. I tried to find a truck wash along the way and even took a nice tour of Corinth, Mississippi, courtesy of a man at a truck stop directing me to the east side of that town where he thought the truck was stood. I drove to the edge of town, past the place he described, and found no wash.

Curiously, this was the first time I used my CB to ask the rolling big rig community about this truck wash. At first, no reply whatsoever. A minute or so later I got a clearly stated pitch that cited street names and landmarks that meant nothing to me. When I asked for a repeat, I got nothing. Then another reply came that sounded like American Southern, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. So I found a street that looked like it would lead me to a place where I could turn around. As luck would have it, there was indeed a Lowe’s a block down that had a nice big parking lot I could turn around in. I made my way back to US 45 and drove the rest of the way to Booneville.

I got there at about dusk. The nice large man in polar gear gave me a door number almost instantly. I joked that I didn’t know Wisconsin allowed cheese to be manufactured anywhere else. He said the facility was owned by a Wisconsin company (Marathon Cheese / there is a Wisconsin town named Marathon). I told him I would be at the door in a few minutes and quickly swept out my trailer hoping it would be clean enough for a load of cheese. Must have been because they got me loaded in just under two hours and I was on my way back north. I was headed to a Kraft facility in Aurora, Illinois.

NavChick had me routed on two lane roads through Eastern Tennessee and finally getting to a freeway near Paducah, Kentucky. I love two lane roads, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like driving on strange two lane roads at night. I was going to get as far as I could before my driving hours counted down to zero and I will plan much more carefully the next time I try that. Headed north out of Jackson, Tennessee, I was certain I would see a truck stop or a Walmart every 45 minutes or so. Not on the route I was on. I was ticking down to less than 30 minutes and checked the DAT Truckers Services app on my droid and when I had signal, It showed me a couple of Walmarts and no truck stops. I figured the Walmarts would be along my path. They were not. I was starting to panic (I don’t know why. It’s not like I would turn into a pumpkin.) and called Stevens Driver Services were of no help (again) whatsoever. With six minutes left on my clock I took an exit off the divided highway I was on and took a right. The first street to the right of that road looked like it led to a commercial area. Remember, it was DARK and after midnight. There was one business and then a residential area. So I crept into the residential area and came to a 90-degree turn to the left and down a hill.  I couldn’t see the bottom of the hill and thought, “What if it’s a cul de sac?”

It was not. But after making another hard left I was on my way back to the “main” road. After scraping by some low-hanging branches I found myself back at the main road. I thought I made a wide enough left but saw that I picked up some mud on my trailer tandems. But at that point, I DID NOT care.

I pulled into an abandoned (at least vacant) gas station right by the on ramp and shut it down for the night. I had four minutes left on my clock. I slept with my clothes on because I was absolutely certain that I would be awakened by a cop pounding on my door and telling me I had to MOVE IT.

Alas, no disturbances. I rested my 10 hours and continued my journey.

I do NOT want anything like that to happen again. I don’t mind cutting it close when I know where I am, where I’m going and what is at the end of the trip, but when I don’t know any of those three things, it’s just too stressful.

The rest of the trip was not without its excitement. I made the drop and hook in Aurora pretty expeditiously, but as Nav Chick was guiding me to a truck stop, she thought it would be cool to take me through a very residential-looking townhouse subdivision. I declined. As I continued down the main road I went under an unmarked underpass that looked pretty tight and came to an industrial looking area that was on the border of a “No Trucks” area. That meant I had to find a place to turn around. I pulled onto the street between two big warehouses and found a place to U-turn about a block in.

On the way back the Nav Chick rerouted me and at about the eighth stop light down a very commercial corridor, I got a call from dispatch that I had left my $90 meat lock on the trailer I dropped. Not wanting to have to buy another one, I headed back to pick it up. For what it’s worth, the security guard at this Kraft facility was a humorless dick. And he had not changed since I left 30 minutes earlier. Even though I  had an empty trailer and had just been there I had to jump through all the hoops. So I did.

As I was leaving the facility for the second time, I decided to head to a different truck stop a little farther away. I got to the Petro near Rochelle at about 10:30 and found their repair shop still open. Because I was pretty certain that the trailer I had just picked up had a defective air bag activation lever (this was the THIRD trailer I had picked up with this problem) I decided to see if they could fix it for me. They could, they said.

That little exercise chewed up another hour and a half what with all the calls to Stevens with diagnoses and cost estimates. The shop ended up doing it for nothing because the repair didn’t require any parts and was a 10-minute fix. But I had to walk about two miles in 25 degree, 30 mile an hour wind so by the time I was ready to settle into my bunk, I was very cold and very tired.

GOOD NIGHT! I never want to go through another 24 hours like that. Famous last words.

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COOOOOLD Weather

Skipping over my trip to Canada, repair of my APU and EGR (I’ll come back to all three of these in the next couple of days), I wanted to bring you up-to-date on my reintroduction to cold weather. I am sitting at a Flying J in Waterloo, Iowa. I’ve been here for about 40 hours. When I arrived, the temp was 42 degrees and I was informed by Tyson Meats that my load would be ready in two days AT THE EARLIEST(!).

It is now 16 degrees with a pretty steady wind, up from 10 degrees which was the low last night. I wore a stocking cap this morning for the first time in about 20 years. I shivered. I exhaled clouds of water vapor. I had to watch where I was walking so I wouldn’t slip on a patch of ice. And STILL I saw a truck driver fueling his big rig in shorts, tee shirt and Crocs. He must have come directly from the football game in Green Bay last night!

I pick up my load of meat at noon and will be hauling it to Laredo, TX, about as far south as you can get in this great nation of ours. I love it when a plan comes together.

Oh, and that’s snow on my hood from yesterday. Fortunately, most of it melted before it got really cold.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

After my week off, which was delightful and relaxing (for the most part), I had to return to the crappy gravel secure area to get started again. Would I have to be retrained? Time would tell, and it would say I had retained enough driving skills to at least get started. I had a new coat, new work boots, a few bags of food and a few more sweatshirts and some rain gear and was ready for the colder, wetter weather that was coming.

Shortly after getting all my extra stuff loaded onto the truck I got my first dispatch. I would be picking up a load in La Porte, Texas, and taking it up to a Walmart Distribution Center in Clarksville, Arkansas. I got to the shipper at about noon and was loaded by 2:30. Not bad. I would be able to get into Arkansas for my first night’s sleep. The drive through east Texas was kinda rough. I had made the drive many times before on trips to see my daughter while she and her family still lived in North Little Rock, but it a big rig, of course, it was different. It was dark, dark, which of course is darker than dark. A lot of four lane roads but north of Nacogdoches, I encountered a number of two lane roads. Evidently this was the truck route. I found a convenient place to park at a Loves in Prescott, Arkansas, and knew I could sleep in and still have plenty of time to get to Clarksville. My delivery appointment wasn’t until 3:15 a.m. a day later. I was hoping I could hook up with some old friends from my own time living in Little Rock. That didn’t work out so I got to a little truck stop in Clarksville just off I-40 by mid afternoon the day before my delivery. I’d be able to get a 10 hour break in and get to the Walmart DC, which was less than two miles away, in plenty of time to make my delivery.

Fortunately, the little truck stop in Clarksville, was adjacent to a bit of civilization. I went for a nice walk, toured a western store (didn’t find any steals), and found a “theatre complex” that was playing the latest Bond movie. I use the quotes because the multiplex building was perhaps the size of a standard McDonalds and contained four theatres. While the prices were right, as you would expect at an itty bitty place that did NOT have stadium seating, on Saturdays they didn’t have matinees and I didn’t want to start a movie at 7 p.m., get back to the truck at 10 p.m. and have wake up at 2:30 a.m. to make the delivery, so I just lollygagged in the neighborhood a little longer.

I found a “club” that looked like it would serve decent food and stopped in. I knew the club meant they served liquor, this being a dry but I would not be imbibing, and would therefore not need to actually ‘join.” Wrong, Scotch-breath. The rule is, in order to breathe the air in the club, whether you drank liquor or not, you needed to pay the temporary membership fee. The good news was, that fee would be deducted from whatever your tab ended up being. Since I was going to  be ordering less than $1o worth of grub, I couldn’t do that to the club so I walked a short distance across the parking lot to a diner where I had a nice $6.50 dinner of hamburger steak and vegetables. Even had leftovers!

I walked back across the freeway to my truck and whiled away a couple of hours on the world wide web and packed it in for the night.

My phone woke me at the appointed hour and I drove the four minutes to the Walmart DC. The drop went pretty well. The good thing about a Walmart delivery is that they are pretty tightly scheduled and as long as you are on time they take something less than three or four hours. In this case less than three. The other good thing is that Walmart has an account with Stevens or whomever so you don’t have to get a cash advance, or cash, to pay the lumpers. It’s all handled electronically. So I sent in my “Empty” macro and hoped I’d get another dispatch soonly.  By the time I was rolling out of the DC, in the dark, my Qualcom chimed indicating I had a new message. Since I COULDN”T READ IT WHILE MOVING, I pulled into a different truck stop that was a quarter mile from the truck entrance of the warehouse complex. (I would have to remember that for next time.) I had a dispatch.

The pickup would be at 6 p.m. a mere 11 hours away. Great! I had another day to kill.

I drove down to a Pilot in Russellville. During my seven hours there I napped, strolled through the mall across the street, checked out deals at a Staples across the other street and watched the weather roll in and over us. I almost took a two mile walk to the gas company offices to see if I knew anybody there before I remembered it was Sunday and there wouldn’t be anybody there. Phshew!

The highlight was probably the weather. The radar matched up nicely with what I was witnessing. Along about an hour before sunset I turned on my Thermo King reefer and hit the road. It was raining lightly. A couple of miles down the road I noticed that the indicator light on the reefer was showing me the red “K” and not the white “T” which means something was wrong. I had to reboot it once before after leaving La Porte ands hoped that would be the end of it. It was not.  I was supposed to me at minus 10 for the load.

I pulled over into a Loves truck stop in Merrillton and tried defrosting and rebooting. Neither worked, although the unit was cooling the trailer. Maybe a sensor was malfunctioning. I called Road Rescue and after 20 FREAKIN’ MINUTES I finally got to talk to a live person. Who told me, if it seems to be cooling, “Go on ahead and pick up your load.”

Alrighty then.

Back on the road, the rain came harder. I found the shipper, the producer of Eggo waffles with only one wrong turn. Fortunately, there was a wide cul de sac that allowed an easy turnaround. When I got to Der Waffelmaker, it looked dark and closed. I went to the keypad at the locked gate and without talking to anyone, the gate magically opened. A hundred yards inside, I saw the three doors, the middle one of which was open. Not much room to maneuver a back in, I thought. I found someone inside the door to the warehouse and he directed me to back on into the middle door. After half a dozen pull ups, with four GOALs (Get Out And Looks), in the pouring rain. Fortunately I had my rain jacket on along with my Duckhead waterproof hat. A genius job of packing, I would say.

By the time I got backed in two other trucks had arrived. I got there just in time.

While they were loading me up, the other two drivers and I talked and compared notes. They both had better-sounding gigs than mine. Of course, the one who lived in Texarkana bragged about how his gig was so sweet because he could cheat his noogies off on his paper logs. He said he spent three days on the road and four days off every week. He probably would have needed at least five days to make his three day trip legally. I found out later he was also a tax and welfare cheat. He lived with his ex-wife to whom he was paying no alimony or child support and who was getting AFDC and food stamps.

But I cut him some slack because he went out to my reefer with me to try and troubleshoot my problem. The temp was holding at about ten below and he simply showed me how to erase the error message. Easy peasy. I got a shiny white “T” and that nasty red “K” stayed retired for as long as I had that trailer. Phshew again.

The other driver just seemed like a good guy from Ohio who liked his job and his company, which was a regional.

I might mention that this plant was only two miles from where I lived for eight years in Maumelle, Arkansas. Wish I would have had the opportunity or the means to take a tour of my old haunts. But I didn’t. Plus it was a dark and stormy night. And did I mention that it was cold and windy?

It got worse.

I got onto I-40 just in time for the skies to really open up. It stayed dark and stormy all the way to West Memphis. Plus there seemed to be construction for half that distance and only one lane open for half of the construction. I believe I had a couple of inch es on each side of the truck and did not always maintain a 55 mile an hour speed. I hear other truckers complaining about how slow traffic was moving but nobody mentioned Stevens so I don’t think they were complaining about me.

West Memphis, if I haven’t mentioned it before, is another truck stop heaven. Three fair size truck stops at the first exit west of the Mississippi. Since I was slated to and did fuel up at the Loves, I decided to stay there if I could. After topping off I made two circuits around the lot and attempted a back in on each loop. It was just too shallow and narrow and I was tired and impatient. Plus, it had been raining enough so some of the trucks already parked had water levels up past their first step. So I found a guy who had invented his own new parking area by angling in behind the last line and angle parked right next to him. I was throwing up significant waves in the parking lot / shallow lake as I parked. Fortunately, when I was fueling up, I pulled my 12 inch rubber boots out of the side compartment.  Good move. Before I got out to walk to the Loves store to get my fuel receipts and get ready for my night’s sleep, I slipped on the boots and my feet stayed nice and dry as I slogged through the four inch deep water. A genius job of packing I would say.

Glad that day was behind me.