Heading Home For Thanksgiving

I'm in Cressona, PA hooked to my next load.  It's a multi-stop load to Texas which will allow me to get home for Thanksgiving.  This load has six separate locations to deliver to.  Three in Houston, TX, two in Austin, and one way down south in Pharr, TX.  The regulations we are working under don't allow me the legal working hours to finish the load in time to get back to Nacogdoches for the holiday, so my dispatcher is allowing me to split it up by delivering the three stops in Houston on Tuesday, then go to Nacogdoches and take a few days off for the holiday, and then deliver the other three stops on Monday.

If you were paying attention in that last post you would have noticed that this load has about 2,800 miles on it.  That is a nice load, but it is very unusual to be allowed to take a few days off in the middle of a load.  These guys that I'm working with, Knight Transportation, are really big on trying to get everybody home for Thanksgiving.  When you have about five thousand drivers out there spread out all over the country, that is no small feat.

Here's what this stuff looks like on my trailer - most of it is aluminum pipe, or round tubing.  There's a few I-beams, some square tubing, and maybe one other shape.

It's a thing of beauty, at least that's the way I see it.  Don't you agree?  There's just something pretty about these nice shiny extruded aluminum products.

We have to tarp all these loads, but when we load up here in the Northeast they insist that we cover the load with some poly sheeting before we put our tarps on it.  Here I am backed up into the tarping station - a contraption that gives you about one inch of clearance on either side of your trailer to back into. It is supposed to keep you from falling off your load while you are up there monkeying around with those tarps.  And it is a good thing too, because trying to lay out your tarps while walking around on that poly sheeting, laid over the top of this nice shiny aluminum, is the closest thing to ice skating that one can do without actually strapping on some skates!  Here it is with the poly sheeting in place.

I'm looking forward to seeing my family, but I am going to miss my youngest daughter Abigail.  I think this will be my first Thanksgiving without her being there.  She is in school in Colorado this year, but we will see her at Christmas, and we'll have a great time together then.