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.....