Headed South

It's Sunday morning and I'm in Cuba Missouri. Yesterday I made it into the downtown Chicago area (West Side), and somehow managed to get my rig through the challenging maze of tight turns, low bridges that will open up the top of an eighteen wheeler like a sardine can, and unemployed people hanging about on the street corners. I don't care what numbers the government puts out about our nation's unemployment numbers – I don't believe them – they are disingenuous at best. Any truck driver who makes his way in and out of these big inner city areas can see it right before his own eyes – there are a lot of people out here drinking beer and hanging out on the streets on the government dole – it's sad, forgive my digression into politics.

Okay, so everything went really well this morning despite the cold weather. I started out at about ten o'clock and left Aurora working my way into the inner parts of Chicago. I got to the Overton Gear Company which is an old company that is located in an area where there is mostly residences now, and everything is so tight in this part of town that they don't even have a place where you can park your truck to get loaded. So they told me to pull over to the side of the road and they would load me right out there in the street! Here's what it looked like as we blocked the street with my truck while the forklift was loading 2 gears and 2 shafts weighing in at a total of 15,000 pounds on my truck.

After that I proceeded to Addison, and they loaded 2 more gears and 2 more shafts exactly like the ones I already had. While on the way to Addison my dispatcher called and said they had canceled my third pick-up which didn't bother me at all considering the bitter cold weather we were working in. So once I got loaded at Addison I started working my way out of the Chicago area and turned south. Thankfully this load is bound for Houston, Texas. I made it down here to Cuba Missouri and slept very well last night. I took a walk when I arrived here at 11:00 o'clock last night in the nice balmy 36 degree weather.

Oh I know I shared the photo of the start of my day when I was driving the last leg up to the Caterpillar plant, but I forgot to show you the view from the cab of my truck as I was getting unloaded at the plant.

Yep, there you have it. A nice way to end your day. You can see why the grumpy old fork-lift operator wasn't too excited about it. It's all in a days work, we have pleasure and pain, comforts and miseries, joys and sorrows. I hope to deliver these large gears that are bound for some oil field well site down in the Houston area early Monday morning. If all goes well I should be on schedule and ready for another load Monday. The SAPA plant is still struggling a little to get up to speed, so it is quite possible I will just be doing another load like this one. I don't really mind – I enjoy this regular flat-bed work, but I'm sure I will be back to my regular dedicated account in a short amount of time.