Where oh where have we been?

Well, we loaded in Georgia and had a very uneventful trip to McGuire AFB in New Jersey. I called to arrange for secure hold for the weekend and found out we could deliver on Saturday, so we didn't have to have a "secure" weekend!

Saturday afternoon we found a good restaurant for a late lunch then headed to a truck stop to wait for a load. Nobody moved all weekend so we did laundry on Sunday and rested up. While doing laundry I was lucky enough to listen to a Longgg Island driver gripe about the company he just started with a couple of weeks ago. He was wound pretty tight. He could've been scary if it wasn't so funny. Another driver looked at me after LI guy left and started cracking up!! Oh well, it made the laundry time go fast.

Monday afternoon brought a load going to New Haven, Connecticut. We took 96 boxes of paper baking molds to a company called Something Sweet. Since we had to go through NYC to get there, we hit a rest stop and slept until 2 am and then headed to the city. That's the ONLY way to make that trip!!!

We off-loaded about 7:30 this morning and found a truck stop to wait for the next load. It was so nice here and we enjoyed being able to just keep the windows open and not have to run the AC.

Just about lunchtime we got a load offer so we headed to Long Island to pick it up and we are now sitting it traffic on I-95, but at least we are headed to Georgia and out of this northeast mess!! Here's a pic of the Throg's Neck bridge.

Dana came up a theory about the stupid people everywhere that seem to be multiplying exponentially. It's called the Bee Brain Theory and is based on reincarnation. Consider this...the human population has exploded while the honeybee population has dwindled. Therefore, it appears that the honeybees are being advanced to human form much too quickly and then grow up and function merely at the Bee Brain level...especially when driving. They go helter-skelter everywhere because as bees there were no traffic laws, no lanes, no restrictions and life was too short to learn.

He also has a theory of why our Vice President is such a blithering idiot. It's called assination insurance. Who would want to kill the president knowing the VP would then be in charge?!?!? Pretty good plan, don't you think?

We're working on other theories and will share them as they develop. Stay tuned!!

Georgia on my mind

So we left Texas Wednesday and headed for Georgia. We had plenty of time and didn't have to rush for a change. :) We stopped just north of Mobile, AL for a few hours of sleep and finished the last few hours this morning and delivered four hours early. Here are some pictures of the Mobile River:


We are now at a truck stop north of Macon until tomorrow when we will head to Robins AFB to load and head to New Jersey to deliver on Monday morning so it looks like another weekend in secure hold. LOL Oh well, at least no one bothers us there!

Stay tuned and maybe we'll have something exciting happen next week.

Rain on the horizon...

Rain on the horizon is a reference my dear friend Maryann made that I'm like the rain....I'm all around but not at her house.

We delivered our load Monday morning to the Army Reserve and headed to the nearest truck stop. After breakfast we napped and waited for a load out and stayed in the air conditioning. About 4 pm we got a load offer for the next morning. It was a "mini" but would give us a first out on the board as soon as we delivered.

This morning we headed to Sunoco to pick up our load and encountered via telephone the rudest security supervisor. He was nasty to his employee and refused to allow Sosa and Zeke to be in the truck even though we explained they are service dogs. So I had to wait outside the gate with the dogs while Dana went in to get the load. Needless to say, we hope they don't ever need us again, because we'll probably refuse the load. We don't need the hassle.

We are now sitting at the truck stop waiting for a load out. Here are some pictures of oil refineries and the the Budweiser plant from this morning:

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day! For Father's Day Dana got out of the east coast area where traffic and people drive him crazy!!

We finally got unloaded Friday morning...the Navy is in no hurry to do anything apparently. We found an IHOP for breakfast, took a nap for about an hour and got a load. We had to drive 4 1/2 hours to get it, almost back to DC and got loaded to drive to.....wait for it....east Texas!! Whoo hoo!

Since the load doesn't deliver until Monday morning, we have plenty of time to get there. We are currently sitting in secure hold at Fort Polk, Louisiana (Maryann, why did you have to leave??? LOL). We got here about 0100 this morning and will leave again about 0500 tomorrow morning.

We are sitting out in the middle of nowhere which we enjoy...no one to bother us. No TV reception, but internet so we're good. We like to listen to NPR on Sunday mornings anyway and have movies for the afternoon.

Oh...if I haven't told you yet, you can now leave comments without an account or signing in. Leave an "Anonymous" comment and just put your name at the end so I know who it was. Should make it easier for anyone wanting to say hello or whatever. Just keep it G-rated (as you may notice I try really hard to do) so when my neice gets access again she can read it too.

Thanks for checking in...see you next time!

Have you missed us?

We had a great visit home. We got Alex moved out of Athens and into a house in South Zanesville. He's going to live with four friends for the summer while he works at Hallmark and takes a couple of classes.

Friday night brought dinner with our great friends, Dave and Bev at Garfield's. We miss those weekly sessions!! It was great seeing you guys!

We enjoyed the company of good friends on Sunday. We grilled and visited all day as people dropped in. It was great to see some that we hadn't seen in months! We missed a few who were unable to make it to the house.

On Monday, Dana visited the eye doc for his exam and then we headed to the Schottenstein Center to see Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. What a show!! They could have played all night and not exhausted the music they have created. It was excellent!

Tuesday was clean house and do laundry again day and then Wednesday we went back into service. We got a load offer around 5 pm to pick up in Maryland Thursday morning so off we went. We got about 3 1/2 hours of sleep and headed to the loading area where we waited for over three hours to get loaded! We finally left the base knowing we probably wouldn't make the cut-off time for delivery even though we were only headed to Virginia Beach. As we headed for the Nice Bridge, we had to call to arrange for a police escort over the bridge since we were hauling explosives. We ended up waiting for over an hour for the officer to get there because he had rescued a 3 week old kitten from the road and was waiting for animal control to pick it up. No way of making same day delivery now so we asked dispatch to make arrangements for secure hold at our destination.

Construction and accidents have ways of adding more time to the mix and then we had to reroute because the route sent to us went through a tunnel and explosives can't go through tunnels.

Anyway, loooonnngg story and day short, we arrived about 1920 (7:20 pm) and called dispatch to have them let security know we were at the commercial truck inspection site waiting. Our next call from dispatch informed us that this Naval station is an annex and we needed to go to the main base for secure hold. Now there were four problems with this. 1)It was 50 miles backtracking to where we came from....2) We were now under a tornado warning and severe thunderstorm warning...3) They wouldn't release us from secure hold in the morning until 0730 and we needed to be 50 miles south again at 0730.....and 4)Apparently dispatch didn't call to arrange secure hold as we requested around noon or they would have had this information and we would have gone to the main base earlier!!!!!

As the lightning flashed around us and the local news channel warned people to stay at home and not travel unless absolutely necessary, we informed dispatch that we weren't going anywhere. That was a little trippy....sitting in a truck with explosives as lightning flashed all around us and the truck rocked from the wind. I guess we did want a little excitement in our lives. LOL We spent the night and were the first truck to get inspected this morning.

So now we are sitting on another part of the base waiting to get unloaded. It's been well over an hour and hopefully someone will be here soon. I just want this load finished!! Who knows what the rest of today will bring. Stay tuned.....

Countdown to home time

Saturday was a relaxing day. We were 6th on the board to get a load out and figured we'd be there until Monday, because nobody moved all day. We hit TGIFriday's for dinner and cold beverages and went to sleep early. We got a call around 11:30 that they needed a truck to move right away to pick up a load. We accepted and hit the road, going about 56 miles south east of Detroit. When we got there, just before 0100, the shipper told us they were supposed to send a truck about 7 pm and must have forgotten and his shift was over at 0100. GEEEEZZZ.

We headed toward Chicago with plenty of time to make delivery. It had to be there for the 11 pm shift start Sunday night. We hit a truckstop before we got out of Indiana (cheaper fuel) to get some sleep and a shower in the morning. We napped all afternoon and left about 9 pm to get to our destination. On the way we got another load offer for Monday morning. It was a mini...only 15 miles but it paid well and picked up about 4 miles from where we were delivering Sunday night. After we unloaded, we headed on over to the next one to either load early or sleep in their lot. The load was ready so we headed 15 miles southwest and arrived at our destination 6 hours before we were even supposed to pick up the load!! We ARE good. LOL

Kathy - we gotta tell you we feel sorry for you, living in Chicago. Your roads SUCK. LOL I don't know when the truck bounced so much except for the stretch of highway out of Elizabethtown, KY!!!

We bumped the dock and went to bed, sleeping well in the industrial park. They were happy to see us there already when they came to work this morning; apparently they needed those barrels of fuel.

Off we went to Walmart (I sure get to see a lot of them) with Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. About 1030 we got a load offer going to Danville IL. We left right away and are sitting here waiting for them to load us. In the meantime we've already got one on the back burner for tomorrow and the day after that we start heading home.

Time Flies

What a week! I looked back to see when I last posted because I couldn't even remember!! So...all the planning in the world can't compete with DC traffic, truck restricted roads and orange barrels. It actually took us 2 hours and 45 minutes to go that 40 miles. Then we found out that first stop (we thought the shipper) was only an inspection site by Homeland Security. Our truck was inspected (as it is at nearly every military base as well as some manufacturing plants) and everybody met the boys and had to pet them. On we went to our next stop which was actually the shipper. We got there within our alloted time frame (I have NO IDEA how) but ran into new issues.

It seems they ordered and paid extra for a truck with a lift gate, which we do not have. They scrambled and got a fork lift brought over from somewhere so they could load our truck with pallets of records going to storage. I plugged our destination into Carmen the Garmin and she said ain't no way we were gonna make 1600 delivery time (this was at 1115). I notified dispatch and asked them to see how late we could deliver. Meantime, when calling for local directions at the destination we found out they don't unload trucks after 1500. HMMMMM

Well, as is typical of dispatch when they do something wrong, they just ignored us all day. We were tired, hot and wanted to stop for a meal if we didn't need to drive straight through and would have to wait to deliver in the morning. But noooooooo, they didn't have the decency to get back to us all day. Needless to say, we weren't having one of our better days.

Along the PA turnpike, we stopped at a rest area and Sosa got his foot tangled in my laptop cord and it crashed to the pavement, bouncing on two corners and shoving the power cord into the housing. Amazingly, the computer still booted up and ran, but I've got to get into it to fix the power adapter plug. Then, our turnpike ticket must have blown out when we were trying to catch the computer and when we got off the turnpike we had to pay the full $50 price! Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

Well, we got to the destination and the security guard said we'd probably have to wait until morning. At that point, we really didn't care. We just wanted to lie down and sleep. However, our story must have been sad enough, because two guys came out from another area, fired up the forklift and unloaded our truck. :) Finally, something good.

The security guard gave us directions to the nearest truck stop and we headed there, telling dispatch that our status was sleeping until 0700 (this was about 8 pm). We walked the dogs and were just heading into the restaurant to finally get a hot meal when they sent a load offer. We accepted it and went in to eat.

After dinner, we hit the road (see the pattern of ignoring us?) to drive back almost where we started from! We got to Virginia the next morning, loaded and headed to Fort Campbell, KY. We arrived there about 0200 Friday morning and slept until 0600. We finally got unloaded and left about 0930 after touring the post twice since security had no idea where they should really send us.

Headed out to Walmart for some sleep (yup, Cap'n, camping again) and some desperately needed groceries. Chinese buffet for lunch and then a load offer. We headed to Bowling Green, KY (where Dana was living when he found me), picked up almost 10000 pounds of aluminum cast housings and headed to Ford in Detroit. We offloaded those at 0600 this morning and here we are again in a Walmart lot. They are so much quieter that truck stops. Besides there aren't any decent ones near here.

so, now, I've caught you all up on the busy week. Next Thursday we move Alex out of the dorm in Athens. Maybe we can catch up with some of you then.

Country Roads Take Me Home

Ok, we just can't figure out why anyone would choose to live in this part of the country. I guess we're just a couple of rednecks after all! We picked up our oh dark early load yesterday morning and got it delivered early. We got to a truck stop, got a shower and took off to pick up another load going to Nova Scotia. Since our truck doesn't have a permit for NS, and we don't have passports to get back into the USA, we couldn't take it there, but could take it part way and then swap it with another truck. We headed to Hazleton, PA and met the other truck about 2 am and got the load moved to their truck.

Finally about 3:30, we got to sleep in the local Walmart parking lot. We woke up to the phone ringing about 10 am. It was a load picking up about 35 miles away and going to Mt. Holly, NJ. Five hours later we were unloaded of the 3000 pounds of cellophane and headed to Maryland to stage for a load for tomorrow.

We are going to Washington, DC tomorrow morning. That should be fun!! We got one of the last parking spots at the only truck stop in the Baltimore area. We're about 40 miles from our shipper and figure it will take about two hours to get there tomorrow morning.

We'll be taking this load about 300 miles west tomorrow and are really happy to be leaving the eastern seaboard. Too many people, too many vehicles. Texas would be nice............