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

COP=change of plans. Have to meet another team tomorrow evening in amarillo, switch loads and deliver two stops on Thursday, Chandler AZ and San Diego Ca. At this rate, my mileage for this pay period is going to be 13,000.

 

David is still interested, he will be finished with me on the 26th. He said he will call you over the weekend.

 

We finally got loaded in Colton at 6pm on Tuesday evening. We ran all night and met the other team at the Flying J in Amarillo Wednesday at noon. David needed to do laundry so we took our showers, he did his laundry and I ran over to Walmart for some restocking. We left about 5pm. I had planned on running to Holbrook then south through Show Low picking up Hwy 60. At the last minute I changed my mind because it was dark and I have never been that way. Instead I decided to run over to Flagstaff then south on 17.

I made it to the rest area just east of Flagstaff at 1:30am. David took over at 4am, I got up to sit in the jump seat only because he has never been down that way so I wanted to make sure we both were on the same page coming down the 18 miles of 6% grade. He did just fine, then I went back to bed. Something happened just as I parked in the rest area that fried my balls the rest of the day, in fact, to the point that David realized real quick I was pissed. An hour after getting in bed my Qualcomm went off with a message, at first I thought it was reload info. Nope, it was a tearse message from night dispatch, it went along the lines of telling me that the load I was on was a time sensitive, critical delivery, and that if I think I am not able to make the delivery on time, to send in a macro on the Qualcomm and to call dispatch. My response was to curse the screen for the rest of the day. I did send a message back explaining to dispatch that as long as my trailer is loaded, every load is time sensitive and critical, to me it doesn't matter if its a Boars Head load or a load of ping pong balls for the national ping pong team of China, it's all the same to me. Got no response so we continued our day. We had an 8am in Phoenix and a 3pm in San Diego. We got to both drops 15 minutes early. David's clock ran out at the last drop so it was my turn to drive.

While getting loaded our reload came through. This is where my biggest complaint with Abilene comes into play. The driver is not kept in the loop with certain loads. In my case it was with this load we are under. I left San Diego at 4:30pm, just a wonderful time of day to be driving in Southern California. We had to go to our Colton yard, 100 miles away to drop the reefer and pick up an empty dry van to load today in Bakersfield. The load came across as a drop in El Paso and Wichita Falls Tx, Wichita Ks, and finals in Topeka Ks. It also said to run the southern route and not go across 40. After checking in at Frito Lay here in Bakersfield I find out its only one drop in Topeka, the load of Pringles can't go over higher elevations because the containers will burst. I call into dispatch to have them clarify this info, they indeed tell me the same thing and that the El Pas, Wichita Falls, and Wichita are the route points I need to follow. You think maybe it should have been conveyed to me, you know, the dude driving this thing? The paid miles for the whole trip is 2250, 500 hundred miles longer so these cans don't pop their tops. I wonder how they get Pringles potato chips to higher elevations throughout the country? I'm done, more to follow I'm quite sure.