Sunday, May 4, 2014

Sarah and I Continue After Taking a Break

We enjoyed our 34 hour reset at Madison, Georgia by taking walks, enjoying some meals at local restaurants, and we even went to a local church for Easter Morning Worship. When Sarah woke up Monday morning I already had us moving on down the road about an hour away from Madison, and the delicious smell of sausages sizzling and frizzling in the pan was filling up the cab of the truck so that it was making it hard to sleep much more. We enjoyed a rolling breakfast together as we kept our freight moving toward it's destination. We arrived at our receiver and had no problems getting our "slinky coils" unloaded quickly.



We sent in our "empty call" on the Qualcomm and waited for about fifteen minutes for our next load which is a load of lumber to be picked up at a Georgia Pacific mill in McCormick SC and will deliver to Rocky Mount VA. Here's what it looked like after we were loaded.



Then I worked on making the tarps look like a professional who put a little pride in his work had done the work, and we set off. We kind of had some of our time get burned up at this plant because of another driver taking his sweet time (he was a rookie, so I'm not going to lay into him) but there were a considerable number of us being held up by him having to do his tarps over a couple of times. This particular mill has a tarping station that you have to work in when doing your tarps, and it is only made for one truck at a time. If he had known what he was doing, he could have gotten his tarps stretched out and secured with just 6 or 8 bungees and then pulled on up out of the way and let the next truck in, but he'll know better next time. Here's our tarped load ready to roll.



We got ourselves up to Blacksburg South Carolina where we stopped for fuel and checked our qualcomm messages which had a pre-planned load on it of a steel load to pick up in Roanoke Virginia tomorrow that will go to upstate New York. I had originally planned on getting started early tomorrow, but after seeing the appointment times on the pre-plan it will be better for us to start around eight in the morning with this current load or else we will end up sitting for a while waiting for our pick-up appointment. I'm sure my DM went ahead and sent me that information knowing I would need it to plan my day tomorrow - he does a great job at knowing how I think and operate. Now that we know what the plan is for tomorrow we decided to go ahead and shut down here at the Flying J in Blacksburg for our evenings rest. We'd been smelling the wonderful smells of "smothered" pork chops coming from the crock-pot in our truck for several hours now, and it was nice to stop, rest, and enjoy the fruit of our labors together sitting in the truck eating a nice "truck cooked" meal. The smothered pork chops with baby bella mushrooms and shallots in a rich brown gravy sure tasted good after a nice days work! I love to cook.



We will begin our day tomorrow with some good hot truck stop showers and a nice breakfast at Denny's. Today we delivered one load and picked up another, and tomorrow we will do the same thing again. That can add up to a lot of work for a flat-bedder and not always a lot of miles, but it's only Monday and I've already got fifteen hundred miles for this week in the bag - it's all good! Looks like it's gonna be a great spring - the rush is on!

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