It's A BIG Country!

The United States really is a big place, although being a truck driver and travelling all across the continent all the time tends to make it seem a bit smaller.  It is funny how after doing this for awhile you start to get to know places all over - you recognize intersections, places to park, and points of interest, or places that have good food.  Having the knowledge or the stored data base of these things starts to make the job much more efficient because you can anticipate how to manage your trips easier and you don't have to be a slave to the map.  I find it amazing how I can drive now from Texas all the way up into New York or Connecticut without even having to consult my map, and still do it without getting off the route of the path that is the most efficient as far as turning the least amount of miles to get there.

Another thing that shows the vast size and geographic diversity of our great nation is the differences in weather that one experiences when constantly moving across the country.  I just completed my work week yesterday afternoon, By work week I mean the time period in which I will have to turn in my paperwork showing my miles that I accomplished for that time period.  In my case we need to have our miles turned in each Tuesday morning by 10 am Central Standard Time.  I started out this week by leaving my comfortable bed and lovely wife in Texas early on Monday morning.  I drove to Delhi, LA to pick up my first load which had several stops on it.  First I went to the Chicago area, then down to Louisville, KY - back northward for two stops in Indianapolis, IN - then all the way up to Wausau, WI.  Form there I was sent to Eau Claire, WI where I picked up almost fifty thousand pounds of sand that was bound for a well site in Baton Rouge, LA.  This brings me back to the point I was making about the differences in the weather.  Once I got as far North as Wisconsin I started seeing things that are so strange to this East Texan - frozen rivers and lakes!  We are still growing produce in our gardens down in Texas in early December, and these poor folks up North are almost ready to start the ice fishing season.

It is amazing all the stuff you see when you spend all your time like some travelling Hobo moving all about with no place to call home.  If I could safely take pictures while driving, this blog would be filled with all kinds of stuff that just sort of happens right before my eyes - like the intriguing site of a grey fox gingerly prancing it's way across a frozen lake, or a white-tailed deer with her triplet set of white spotted babies peacefully grazing in an open field.  It's like living three life times when you are on the go all the time.  It has it's pleasures, which are almost addictive, and it's pains which are only eased by the brief visits at home with the people you love.  Although it was very cold in Wisconsin the snow isn't anything like it was last year, but we are still early in the winter season.

Just in case you are the inquisitive type and are wondering how I hauled a load of sand on a flat-bed trailer, I am happy to show you.  A trip from Wisconsin to Louisiana with fifty thousand pounds of loose sand would leave quite a trail of sand along the way, so it was all packed away in these nice little "gift bags" to keep it all on my truck as it made it's way down south.

This job I am doing is serving a dedicated customer, SAPA Aluminum, but when we get so far away from Louisiana like this, we will try to find a "back haul" load such as this one to help pay our way back to the plant where we will pick up our next load.

So, getting back to the thoughts about how big this land is, when I turned in my paper work showing that I had accomplished the things that were sent to me to do this week, I had driven around thirty six hundred miles!  That is all in a weeks worth of work - the crazy part is I do this all the time.  That is a lot of miles, and you have to be very careful with your time management to be able to do all that legally.  To be honest with you, I actually broke the law in a couple of different ways this week, I'm not excusing it or saying it is right to do, but let me tell you how it happened and you can be the judge of what I should have done.

Just before I picked up this load of sand my dispatcher had scheduled me a fuel stop with instructions to fill up.  This truck holds 250 gallons of fuel - that comes to about 2,000 pounds of fuel.  This load of sand put me over the legal weight limits by about six hundred pounds.  What is a truck driver to do in this situation?  He has the authority to refuse the load, but that means he will sit idle while they unload him and try to find another load for him, which foolishly burns up his legal working hours.  He could demand that the company get him some overweight permits which costs the company more money on a back haul load which they may have taken on the cheap just to help pay for the cost of the trip, plus depending on which states we will be travelling through this may take a couple of days to get processed.  Had I known the weight of this load beforehand I would have instructed my dispatcher to let me wait until loaded to see how we were on the weight before fueling, but I wasn't privy to that information.  So here's what I did: I first contacted my dispatcher with the information and told him what my plan was.  I decided to roll with it because once I had driven about six hundred miles I would be legal due to the burn off rate of the fuel.  This is where math is so useful to a truck driver.  I studied my route and knew that I would be passing two weigh stations in that first six hundred miles.  I also knew that one of them was closed, or at least it was closed earlier that morning when I passed it.  Another part of this calculated risk of mine was that they will usually give you a pass if you are only a small percentage over weight, and by the time I would be at the second weigh station I would be down around less than two percent overweight.  So, I took my chances and what do you think happened at that second weigh station?  They were closed also!

Part of this whole scheme was that I instructed my dispatcher how far I needed to go to become legal, and then I told him where I would like him to dispatch my next fuel stop.  That way I could get myself down to a legal weight, and then when I needed to get fuel I could just weigh my truck at the certified CAT scale at the truck stop, and determine just how much fuel I can take on and still be legal.  I can then manage my fuel intake and burn off to keep me legal the rest of the way to Baton Rouge.  The whole point of telling all this is so that you can realize the challenges I face daily, and the creative ways one can develop to overcome them and keep the wheels turning so that I can maintain a decent level of income.  So many drivers get overly frustrated and give up on this career early on into the learning curve, but I enjoy facing the problems while safely, and creatively coming up with ways to succeed at this stuff.

Okay, I said I broke the law in a "couple" of ways.  The other thing was that as I was on the last leg of my trip, which was from Baton Rouge back to Delhi, I had only three hours and fifty three minutes left on my seventy hour clock.  It was tight but doable, until I got into a construction project where they were stopping the traffic for lengthy periods of time.  So about fifteen minutes before I got to the city limits of Delhi, my Qualcomm started going crazy with it's alarm warning me that I had gone over my seventy hour working limit.  I just calmly ignored it until I got into the plant at Delhi where I am now taking my ten hour break hoping to start all over again on a new work week.  This week I will be working off of my re-cap hours since I didn't get the benefit of a thirty four hour break.  Re-caps are a crazy regulation which states that each day you can only work the same amount of hours that you worked on the day you were working eight days before.

As soon as I can, I will share with you my next adventure, I never know where I may be going, but I can be confident that I will be going somewhere very soon.  My dispatcher is out this week for some training.  Our safety director will be dispatching us and it is never the same when that happens, but hopefully I will still have a productive week.

Oh, I almost forgot, Daniel and I got to meet up with each other in Baton Rouge!  It was kind of late, but we found a restaurant that was still open and we enjoyed a meal together.  He gave me a nice compliment on Trucking Truth when he told about meeting up with me.  He said that having people like me in his life has improved his character.  He is all the time asking me advice, and I try my best to give him good solid wisdom when I can.