Pittston,PA

Hello there from a nice comfy hotel room here in Pittston. We have been pretty busy since Thanksgiving and running ourselves ragged so I haven't posted. I will give you the shortest rundown of what we have been doing.

After my last post, we continued on to our drop that load in Lewiston,ME. We made great time and J was able to get us there a few hours before appointment time. He got us docked and then woke me up so that he could head to bed. Around 1000 hrs local, I was unloaded and headed out except that I had half a pallet of persimmons that they rejected. After placing a call in to our claims department I headed down to the closest truck stop to wait for word back on what they wanted me to do with the product. It took several hours but they finally told me to dump the product and sent me our next load. Unfortunately, getting rid of that many cases of persimmons is easier said than done.

Luckily we didn't have to pick up our next load until 2200 hours that night (Sunday) so we had some time to figure out what to do. I let J sleep until around 1500 then we got up and figured out what to do. Where we were parked would not let us dump them in their dumpster so we had to move on to find another place. We found a service plaza in Kennebunk,ME and the attendants there said that we could dump them in their dumpster so we lucked out.

As soon as we did that, we headed to Haverhill,MA to pick up an overnight load going down to Jersey City. This was a nice easy load with only 266 miles to run overnight. On the down side, J ran out of hours before midnight so he had to park for a while. He got me up the next morning and I drove the last 90 miles or so into Jersey City to make that delivery. We got there on time, even though you know how much we hate going into that area, and we made it to a dock in pretty short order. It did take a while to get unloaded, but once I got my paperwork back I found out that this load also had product that was rejected. This time is was 68 cases of Pillsbury busquits. Only a few of the cans had exploded but they refused all the cases on that pallet. Soooo, here we go again. This is one of the reasons that I don't like picking up pre-loaded trailers. When we do that we don't know what condition the product is in.

Anyway, once I called claims, yet again, they tell me to take the product to a Salvation Army in Perth Amboy,NJ. Talk about some small streets and low clearances! We even had to park in the middle of the road blocking traffic with cars having to go in the oncoming lane to get around us while we were unloading. But it was worth it to know that at least this product was going to people that could use it instead of having to throw it in a dumpster. When we left, we managed to follow our directions, which were wrong, and had to turn around at the entrance to an apartment complex because the road dead-ended. Whew, that wasn't fun! But we got turned around and from there we had to go find a trailer wash.

We managed to find the trailer wash and get that done and then we headed over to Tropicana where we were told to drop our trailer. Finally! We were getting a few days off! Well, only because we had to put the truck in the shop. LOL So we drove to Pittston,PA where we have a yard and put the truck in the shop. We were having problems with the air compressor. When we got here we found out that we couldn't get the truck in until this morning, so last night we checked in to a hotel and this morning J took the truck up there and waited while they got it fixed. Not knowing when we checked in how long it would take to get the truck fixed, we had gotten the room for two nights. So instead of heading out this afternoon when the truck was ready, we decided to stay until in the morning. This way we both will get a restart on hours and we needed a rest.

Now we are all rested up and ready to go back out until we take a few days off right after Christmas!