Indian River

Heck yeah, feel free to post your experience on this one. Good luck with everything, and if you need info about the different customers you pickup or deliver to let us know. Some allow overnight parking, some don’t. 99% of them are easy to find.

One friendly tip in advance… when you receive your load assignments, always scroll down to the bottom and check the comment section for additional info you might need. The reason being, some places require us to get a Cat scale ticket on the way in and after we leave. Hood River, Oregon is one. If you go there to load without one, it’s a 30+ mile drive back to the Pilot in Biggs, and they will make you go get one (speaking from experience lol) Salem, Oregon and East Syracuse, New York are a few others. You can pay for them with your fuel card. I usually swipe my own card and just scan the receipt in for reimbursement.

I was in Winter Haven last week, and the outbound loads on the yard were plentiful. My orientation was in Clovis, NM. If I remember correctly, I did my drug test and physical in advance to speed the process up. I drove my pickup there. They got me a motel. Paperwork, introduction and handshake with the office staff, 5 or 10 minute road test with a random driver who happened to be in the lounge waiting on a PM service, and that was it. When people ask me to describe the surge, I tell them it’s the same feeling you get when you back under a trailer too hard and slam the kingpin on accident.

Hope to see you out here next year.
Larry H.

 

I see a lot of outdated comments too. A fairly new guy and I were sitting in Grandview, WA one day shooting the breeze several years ago. He told me he had pulled a yeast load out of Memphis and that dispatch had sent him a comment on the load assignment followed by about 5 exclamation points that rubbed him the wrong way. He ranted about it for a minute before I explained to him he wasn’t being singled out and that those are just default entries attached to the assignment that every other driver receives when dispatched on that load. I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Must scale offsite at a 3rd party” are the words I scan for. Once in a blue moon the address might be incorrect too, but it’s rare. There’s a calf ranch in Cimarron, KS that guys used to have issues finding. The assignment address was an old ran down farm house where the owner used to live years ago before moving the operation about 5 miles away. The first time I went there, I followed the gps and a farmer flagged me down and proceeded to tell me “You guys always come here first for some reason.” He then led me to the correct location and told me he had to do that with almost every truck. There’s another one in Wisconsin (I think) where the address is a corporate office in downtown, not the actual facility. Until you’ve been to most of the customers, it’s best to pull the address up on satellite view and zoom in. Round silo tanks or other tankers is a good thing to search for. It also helps with pulling into the correct gate since a lot of times we use a different entrance than the van drivers do.

 

Totally agree and completely with you on this. Back when I first started, there was a night dispatcher in Clovis (before the pandemic when they were open 24/7) who I leaned on for info. He was a former OTR driver who had worked here 10+ years and knew the system pretty well. He had lost his medical card if I recall and was in the office to maintain his employment. It didn’t matter where I was throughout the country, if I wanted to know if XYZ customer took early deliveries, was XYZ customer time-sensitive, if there was parking nearby, etc. he could answer it. That guy saved me a lot of time and enabled me to get around quick with his knowledge. I try to pass it along, too, like he did. I’m not 100% certain, but I think he ended up buying his own truck.

That customer we were talking about in Arcadia to get you home is a good one. Sometimes I’ll load in Oregon, drive all the way there, drop the tank, drive around the other side of the building and pickup a different loaded tank, then shag out of there and take it to Minnesota. Sometimes you just go in there and drop, then bobtail to the terminal (if there’s no empty available). There’s another one in Florida off 95, but I can’t remember the name of the city. It’s south of Daytona and is also a drop/hook where you could probably work something out as far leaving the tank to bobtail home.

 

I forgot to mention that I finally made it to our new terminal in Cordele, Georgia last week. That place is nice and couldn’t be in a better location! It’s basically a huge extension of the back row at the Loves, right off I-75. That will definitely come in handy for late night parking if a guy is short on hours prior to or after going through Atlanta.

I ran a load from Baconton up to Shippensburg, PA then grabbed a loaded one at the Port of Wilmington, Delaware and ran it down to Bradenton last night. It was nice to see they finally finished the construction in Orlando. I’m in Winter Haven scheduled to pickup in Arcadia tomorrow morning, then headed to Turlock, California.