My Final Days With Sarah

We actually got into some snow in upstate New York, that was a surprise after going through some really beautiful weather in other places. I guess winter is reluctant to give up it's strong grip on those New Yorkers. While making our way up into Sanborn NY we drove over the bridge from Grand Island over the Niagara river and could see the vapors rising from Niagara Falls in the distance. When we delivered this load we were done with our hours and parked at the K-Mart in Niagara Falls for a ten hour break.

Our next load was to pick up some large paper rolls in Oakfield NY, and take them to Danville, PA. This was one of the same places I had been to with my other daughter, some of you will remember it as the place where the little fork lift with a funny face was staring at us.

Here's what our load looked like after we had it secured, tarped, and ready to roll on down the road.

After getting that job done we got a short haul load of shingles that was headed to Danville CT. When we arrived at the plant they told us that our pick-up number was for a load that wasn't even supposed to pick up for another four days. Well, at that point it was 7:30 at night and those poor folks at night-time dispatch didn't have a clue about what to do about that, so Sarah and I shut er down for the night and sent my DM an e-mail explaining the situation, and reminded him that while I was willing to take that load, I really needed to get her back home so she could get back to her job. First thing in the morning he sent me a message to ignore that load, he hadn't realized the planners had put it on me, and he had a load of stainless steel pipe from Clark Summit, PA that was bound for Houston, TX which would allow me to drop her off at the house on my way through. I love the way this guy pulls it all out for me when I need him to work a little magic for me.

Here's our tarped load of stainless steel pipe. I took it to a distributor, but they told me this stuff goes into nuclear power plants.

We had a great time together seeing the sights, and she got to see what the "Old Man" does on a daily basis. They kept us moving right along as you can see from this screen shot of my qualcomm - there's one line not in the picture with about 385 miles on it, so if you can add all those numbers up you'll see what adds up to a pretty good weeks worth of work. We traveled from a port on the coast of Texas up to Niagara Falls NY, and back down to TX together, and that makes a decent work week for a driver.

I thought I'd leave you with what was to me the most interesting thing we saw on this trip, and for some reason it escapes me right now where we were, but it was on our way back to Texas from Upstate New York. We passed this salt mine where there was a huge pile of rock salt out side. If you look closely you can see the bull-dozer up in the top right hand area of the pile and that will give you a little perspective as to just how large this pile of rock salt was.