Watkins Shepard, Here I Come

Waiting to hear all about it!

 

Had an interesting day out in the boondocks of Idaho. Had to navigate the truck up a 10% dirt grade. I stalled it out once, but managed to get it up the hill. After 30 minutes on windy, up-and-down dirt roads, we did the drop, then immediately got a reload 4 hours away in Salt Lake City. Great! A weekend load... only we're dropping it on Monday in Washington. 13 hours of driving. We're still trying to make this work, but it is definitely getting hard at half-pay (and probation rate for me).

I got stopped for five minutes by a herd of cows on the road (yup, seriously) and the truck was attacked (lazily) by two chickens. It was, if nothing else, an interesting day.

 

Hey there! If you get a chance, send me a pm and, if you can trust me with it, your phone number and maybe we can catch up without you having to navigate the site on your phone? Glad to see you're still around and trucking!

 

I've been too tired lately to update much here. Been running pretty hard; I have four 500+ mile days in the last eight. That may not sound like a lot to solo drivers, but for a team flatbed, that means I've also loaded/unloaded about six times in the last eight days. Okay, maybe five. But that's a lot of hard exercise!

Since I hadn't ever done it, I finally talked Joe into letting me completely untarp, unstrap, and unload yesterday. For those who don't touch flatbed with a 100-foot pole, this means I went around the entire load removing 50+ bungees from the tarps (one on front, one on back). Then I put on my She-Ra gloves and pulled off each 100-pound (or so) tarp individually, stretched it out, and folded it up, using two bungees to secure it. The fun part? I got both of those suckers back on the deck by myself. Woot!

Once the tarps were taken care of, I went around the trailer again and removed all the straps, rolled them, and put them away. Then I sorted the bungees into long and short and put those away.

By the end of this, I was a pretty damp, sodden mess, but the load was all ready to unload.

The worst part, sadly, was having to back OUT of the receiver's onto a street. I did it (with help), but I would have rather untarped again.