Henderson,NV

Yes Father Luke, they certainly do come along right when you need one. And we needed that day. It was really nice to chill and not do a darn thing. :)

Well, here we are in Henderson,NV. Since we decided to stay until Monday am and get a restart on our hours, there were a lot of teams looking for a load first thing Monday. Our FM found us a load that was dropped there in the yard coming to Henderson but it didn't have to be here until Wednesday at 1600 and it was an appointment which meant we really couldn't deliver it any earlier. So we stayed the night in the truck Monday and headed out about 0530 Tuesday morning. Going to that class we saw what a huge difference it makes going slower and getting better fuel mileage. We already knew this and usually only run 58-60 but we decided to see what going 55 mph would do and how big a difference it would make. Since we were coming to Henderson which is a suburb of Las Vegas, we headed up to Kansas City,MO from Springfield and hit I-70 across Colorado and the Rockies and over to I-15 in Utah and then south to Henderson. That route has quite a few pulls in it (mountains). Ok, so it has a LOT of them. But we stuck to 55 mph the whole way. Granted this made for a LONG day in the seat just to get our miles. We stopped only long enough to fuel twice and once over in Wakeeney,KS we stopped and got out of the truck about 45 minutes to get a sit down meal. Our appointment was at 1600 and we pulled in at 1555 local time. Granted we would have been probably 30 minutes early but they are doing construction on I-15 in Vegas and that held us up. We re-set our fuel so we could see how many gallons we used on this trip and what our mpg was. We ended up using 223.3 gallons of fuel and we got 6.9 mpg. I know what you are thinking, but 6.9 in a truck is awesome! They paid us $1220.62 in fuel surcharge and we only paid $1026 for that fuel which means we made money off the fuel surcharge. SWEET! Now we are going to drive 55 for a month and see what kind of savings we are seeing but so far I am liking it. It is going to take some getting used to though to sit in the seat longer than what we are used to in order to cover the same amount of ground..

We are heading home this weekend and our FM found us a load that is loading in Irwindale,CA in the morning at 0700 and we are dropping it off at our drop lot in Justin,TX so that will get us home. Our FM always comes through for us on these things and we really appreciate it. I know we were off a few days in Springfield, but we have stuff we need to get done at the house. And the last two weeks were good and we have made enough last week even taking that class to cover the truck payment and we will make enough with these two trips to cover this weeks payment so we shouldn't come out in the hole. Once we get back out we willl stay another 4 weeks until Justin's graduation from Navy Boot Camp which is I believe August 20th so that is the next time we will take a day off.

So now we are done and are going to head down to Barstow,CA to spend the night and I will drive us into Irwindale,CA in the morning to pick up this next load.