Carson,CA

After I posted last Friday, I headed inside to grab some lunch and kill some time. I came back out to the truck around 1400 to find out we had a load. It picked up Saturday morning at 0400 at Anheuser Busch in St Louis and was delivering in Ogden,UT. Since it didn't pick up till the next morning and was less than 90 miles away, that meant we got to kick back and take it easy the rest of the day.

Around 1600 my phone rings and it is our FM. He wants to take us off of that load and give us another load that a solo is picking up in Indiana. It seems that where he was getting the trailer loaded at didn't know what they were doing and he had been back twick to get the load re-worked to get it to a legal weight. Enough time had passed that there was no way a solo could get it to California on time. Heck, even a team couldn't get it there on time now, but we could do it faster than a solo. Around 2200 that evening, J takes off and heads east to meet up with the driver at a Pilot in Levenworth,IN.

J manages to get there right around 0300 so I get up and get ready to drive. We pick the load and paperwork up, go scale and take off. That day I managed to get us into Springfield,MO. This was Saturday around 1400. We had to stop there and have the trailer looked at. The front axle brakes were grabbing, a tire was low and the light for the reefer unit wasn't working. After about two and a half hours, a cheeseburger and a shower later, we are done and ready to roll.

J takes off from there and gets us to a rest area just east of Amarillo,TX. He had a heck of a time making it that far with the winds blowing like they were. I took over and made a stop in Amarillo for fuel and a quick stop at the Freightliner to see if they had our paperwork ready (they didn't) and then I was off again. I managed to make it to the NM/AZ state line where J took over once again with the goal of getting me as close to the receiver as he could.

I woke up around 0230 this morning and he was about 18 miles out of Barstow. Excellent! That only left me about 130 miles to go. We stopped at the Pilot there to switch and we were off again. I made one more quick stop at the TA in Ontario for fuel and then made the last 50 miles to our receiver.

After finding the gate locked, I finally found someone to let me in. They had me back to a door and wait until they verified the seal and stuff before they had me open the doors. Turns out the seal number on the trailer didn't match the one on the paperwork. Uh oh! Of course this was from them re-working the load twice and using a total of 3 different seals by the time they were done. It is something that I should have caught when we picked up the load from the other driver, but I assumed he had verified it when he picked up and did his depart call. Of course, I do know what they say about assumptions.... Anyway, the receiver didn't seem to worried about it since it was sealed and both doors were padlocked the entire trip. He said they will just have to wait until their QA guy comes in before they can ship it to their customers. But he said I wouldn't have to wait, so that is good.

They are unloading me now so it shouldn't be too long before we are ready to roll again. Unfortunately, they will have me done just in time to enjoy the Los Angeles morning rush hour traffic. Hopefully I will be going the opposite direction of most traffic since I am down south of LA in Carson. I will be headed north when everyone else is trying to go south.

I guess I will head back to the TA and wait for a load there. I imagine I will have to wait a few hours unless by some miracle I am surprised with a quick reload. We shall see!