Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

“Sorry honey, work called, got a load of beating hearts for some big transplant job in the PNW… gotta go!!!”

 

To all these fine folks at Abilene,

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

 

That was almost me. My hunch about my current load was correct, and I was right to pick it up last night instead of waiting until today. Because not only are they closed today, they're closed until Monday. That would've been an awkward phone call to HQ.

 

My mom and dad got divorced when I was 5. They got divorced again when I was 12, because being married once wasn't enough and they figured they'd go for Round 2.

As part of the custody arrangement, dad got us for Thanksgiving and mom got us for Christmas.

Now, mom's family all lived in the same town, which is also where we lived. And every year for Christmas, it was a big to-do. 25-30 people in the house for Christmas dinner. Big pot of shrimp gumbo, sauteed shrimp, fried lake fish that my two uncles had caught the day before, sourdough biscuits, etc. So I have a very strong attachment to Christmas. Christmas to me was friends, family, fellowship, fun, and food. And presents. Many, many very fond memories of Christmas.

Dad's family, on the other hand, lived in California, which was very, very far away from where we lived. Far enough that hopping in the car and driving out there for Thanksgiving was prohibitively expensive. Whenever dad got us for Thanksgiving, we mostly just stayed at his house, not doing anything much different than what we would normally do whenever we'd go to visit him on the weekends. A couple of times, he took us to Luby's. So I never really developed the kind of attachment to Thanksgiving that I did for Christmas. When I think of Thanksgiving with my dad, I think of Luby's.

And since I've never had a strong attachment to Thanksgiving, I've always been happy to work on Thanksgiving so my co-workers (who value Thanksgiving more than I do) can have the time off.

 

So the load that I'm on has a lot of time baked into it. I have already sat around a full 24 hours, babysitting the load (for which I put in for layover) and still managed to arrive an hour early for the listed 6:00pm today delivery time. Only to find out that it was rescheduled and nobody told me and it isn't actually due until tomorrow at 6:30pm. So I was 25.5 hours early.

So now I'm parked at a brand spanking new Rutters in Bedford, PA with plenty of truck parking, where I will sit another 24 hours before delivering the load tomorrow. And I will be putting in for another day of layover.

Nice to know this place exists, though. I thought i was going to have to head back to the Turnpike for truck parking, which would've added an extra 24 miles to the return trip tomorrow as I drove 12 miles eastbound to the next exit where I could turn myself around.