Day six

My work day today was from about 6 am until 8:30 pm

Started the day with planning my last leg of my trip which was getting into Cincinnati, and getting to my receiver which was in the downtown area of the city. Studied several different sources until I felt I had come up with a plan that would get me into the right place without any mishaps. When delivering a load on a fifty three foot spread axle trailer in a downtown area with very tight turns you don't want to get yourself in a bind anywhere if you can help it. I also went ahead and filled out my Transflo paper work that I will have to send in after I get unloaded. It's so easy to do this stuff now - we used to have to find a truck stop with a transflo scanner to send in our paper work, but now you can use your smart-phone and snap a photo of the pages and send it in using their phone app.

I logged myself to on duty at about seven a.m. and after my pre-trip I started rolling toward my destination. Arrived right at 8 a.m., which was the earliest they would receive me. I spent about 30 minutes on duty unstrapping my 47,000 pound load of slinky coils, and then I went off duty for about an hour until I was unloaded. I sent in my paperwork and sent my dispatcher an empty call, which produced the immediate effect of my qualcomm going off like crazy with messages from him telling me that I still had my load going to Syracuse New York. Man I was glad about that, I was afraid my blunder the other day had messed things up, but we're still on. The only problem is that it still has the same delivery date, I'm going to really be challenged to see if I can get it home on time. Here's a couple photos of me getting ready to be unloaded on Depot Street in Downtown Cincinnati.

We "high tailed" it over to Shoals Indiana from Cincinnati to the USG plant to pick up a load of Sheetrock bound for Syracuse New York. Fortunately for the sake of my time management this will be a drop and hook at the Sheetrock plant. This is a little unusual in the flat-bed work that I do, but occasionally we get a load like this, usually it is a Sheetrock load. I drop my trailer in the yard, leave enough tarps, straps, bungees and corner protectors with that trailer to secure and tarp the load that will go on it, and I will get those things back with the trailer that I am hauling out of the plant. This is a nice treat to not have to throw the tarps on this load, it's already done for us and we still get paid for doing it - not even a truck driver could complain about that.

We do our best at getting to our fuel stop just on the other side of the Ohio line before we are forced to take our thirty minute D.O.T. break. After that we keep pushing what little time we have left to get ourselves to the Flying J at Sunbury Ohio. While we were rolling down the road we had our supper simmering in the crock pot tempting us to shut down with it's fragrance filling the air inside our cab.

After finding a place to park we indulged our willing appetites with this truckers Jambalaya that had been teasing us along the way for too many miles. It's a simple and inexpensive recipe that I made up myself with chopped up bologna for the meat. It sure tasted good on this cold damp night.

We've still got a ways to go tomorrow, but if we don't hit any snags I'll get this thing in there before 1600 hours and that will have me caught back up with where I needed to be before the blunder that caused me to sit idle for two straight days. Everything's looking favorable except the weather, we will just have to see how it goes. When you sign up to be a road warrior you just have to take things as they come, and when the boss expects you to produce like a professional, you tackle the job and don't complain. After all this is what we wanted to be, an American Truck Driver.