Effingham,IL

I talked to Picabo972 today and she graciously informed me that I am slacking yet again. And I have to admit that she is right! After heading back out after our cruise, I am finding it hard to get motivated. Especially since in less than 90 days, we will be going on another cruise. This one will be with Picabo and her man and no kids though! YES!!! Oh, and of course J is going! LOL

So, let me catch you up real quick without going into too many of the boring details. We made it in to Salt Lake City and ended up and dropped our load at the customers as opposed to our lot which was our original plan. They didn't have any empties there and they said it would be the next morning before we got a load (we dropped around 2200 hours) so we headed back to the yard to get a good nights sleep.

I woke up the next morning and called in after 0700 and we still didn't have a load. J woke up and was hungry so we headed down to the Sapp Brothers to get some breakfast then headed back to the yard to wait. J headed to bed and I headed inside to watch some TV. Around 1100 we got a load but it didn't load until 1900 that night. I chilled the rest of the afternoon inside and then went to wake J up around 1600. After finally finding an empty on the lot that had just came out of the repair bay (the only empty that was there) we hooked up to it and headed up to Logan,UT to get loaded.

I headed to bed and J took care of getting us loaded. We had extra time on this load, so after J scaled the load, he parked for the night. It was a really short work day for him, the lucky guy! He knew that we would be heading over the mountains to get out of the Salt Lake area and he knows I don't sleep good in the mountains, where he can sleep like a rock through just about anything. Although that could be because when he is driving it is like Mario Andretti on a road course so I am getting thrown aound in the back, where as I am more like a Grandma out for a Sunday afternoon drive. Ok, so he isn't really that bad, but he figured I would get more sleep if he just parked, and he was right. :) So the next morning I got up and headed out.

That load delivered right outside of Dayton,OH on Monday night. J managed to get us in there and then headed to our next pick up which was up towards Cleveland. When I had went to bed, we had our next work assignment which was to pick up anywhere between 0800-1500 hours today. So when J woke me up at 0230 this morning, I was a bit confused since he said he was almost to the shipper and needed the extra eyes to find it. After giving him a strange looke, he informed me that we had a different load to pick up, not the one that we had when I went to bed. Oh. Ok, now things are starting to make sense. I guess he mentioned to our night FM that the load we were originally on basically sucked as far as pay goes. Our night FM looked at it and agreed and then found us another load that had the same amount of miles but paid $1500 more. Now THAT is what I am talking about.

Now that I was coherent and knew what was going on, we proceeded to look for our destination so that we could pick up our next load. Turns out our directions were COMPLETELY wrong. We followed them THREE different times, back tracking to see if we missed something. Nope, those directions put us right in the middle of a cemetery. Of course we didn't turn into it, LOL, but we knew it was wrong. We called in to our night FM, looked up the address on Streets & Tris and on Google Earth and finaly found where we needed to be.

We got there around 0400 this morning and got loaded and by 0500 we were on the road and are now headed to Nogales,AZ with a hazmat load. The nice thing is that it is light. Only 4 totes weighing about 16,000 lbs. Currently getting 8.34 mpg. WOOHOO!!! Anyway, we should be in Nogales,AZ on Thursday morning and we will deliver as soon as we get in there. From there I am hoping we will get a decent run back to the east coast. I am thinking that a produce load to Florida wouldn't be bad if we can get a floral load coming back out of there!

So, my apologies for slacking. I will try to do better. If only I could get out of my Carribean state of mind. But it is such a nice state.......