Van Wyk Inc.

and i didn't mean drivers as in there exact name and truck number... thought i should just clear that up, but in general feel free to join in....

 

Hey that sound like a good idea. I'd like to hear some "dumb driver stories". Of course, the Sheldonites would be afraid that customers would see those stories.

 

@bbechtel yea i will run anywhere they ask me to,I let Cory know that when I came here,I really enjoy the west coast except the usual 34 you have to take while your out there but there is no way to get around it.

 

The last time I went out west was a couple years ago. I get to Sheldon at the beginning of the week and Jay offers me a load to Denton, TX. I'm like, "sure, change of scenery". I get down there, reload at an Excel plant somewhere south of Amarillo (can't remember the name of the town) for a load with a stop at Fallon AFB in Nevada, one in Reno, and the last one up by Tacoma, WA somewhere.

It was a good adventure, frusturating at times though. Somewhere in Arizona or NM there was a bunch of Army boys in line behind me getting coffee at a Pilot when I stopped to get one of those glad hand air hoses for your tires. I had a trailer tire leaking but there weren't any tire shops around. I told the cashier to add their coffees to my tab, paid for their coffee and they started talking to me, showed me their 8x8 Army trucks & gave me a can of Army-issue insect repellent. (100% deet, the good stuff)

Then when I got to the J in "Loss" Vegas (as I call it) my reefer unit was overheating and I had to have the condenser pressure-washed at the Blue Beacon. It was all plugged up probably because I had to leave the trailer overnight in the shipper's dusty lot in Texas. Then I ran the rest of the trip with my 5th wheel all the way back to get better airflow to the unit.

The 2-lane road from Las Vegas to Fallon, NV was basically a tour of old ghost towns. I saw a couple fighter jets flying 10 feet above the desert going hundreds of knots, dropping dummy bombs on targets. I saw a little lake with a sign saying "US Navy Submarine Warfare Research Center" and was wondering what in the hell a submarine base was doing in the middle of the desert.

Got them first 2 stops off, had to get a fuel override from Janet cuz we didn't have any fuel stops in the Reno area at the time. Took another 2-lane road cutting through northern CA from Reno over to the Mt. Shasta area and got stuck for about 2 hours while the road was closed because of a forest fire. The firefighter asked me to shut off the truck, and I also put the reefer unit on start/stop for the first time since it overheated in Vegas. When the unit was off, we could hear the forest for a few minutes before some other trucks came up behind mine and then all we could hear was their engines. It was cool. For about 20 minutes until those other trucks arrived, we could hear the forest fire 2 miles away, we could hear the animals freaking out and running away from the fire. Birds and small critters were going crazy. It was like that Pink Floyd song off the Ummagumma album "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict".

I get up to the Oregon POE and got a perfect inspection, but only after I had to point out to the DOT bear that my fuel receipts DID match my log book. He was reading the carrier address on the Flying J receipt from my fuel stop a few days earlier in Checotah, OK and thought I'd gotten fuel at a Flying J in Sheldon, IA and logged it as being in OK.

I got empty, had to take a 34 at the J in Tacoma, which ended up being fun cuz this psycho-### redhead female Werner driver about my age was talking to me and we ended up splitting a cab and going to the top of the Space Needle in Seattle.



I ended up having to go way the hell down about 50 miles south of Portland for my load back east that went to Fairmont, MN.

It was a good trip but I was a little burnt out from the road by the time I eventually got home.

 

how many tractors does van wyk run minivans? i dont think ive ever seen one of your trucks on the road

 

182, plus a handful of O/O's, according to a FMSCA website. At any given moment they're usually scattered across the country between the midwest and the east coast.

 

There was this county mounty who lived around the block from me when I was growing up. He used to harass me all the time for riding motorized toys on the street. He looked like a taller version of William Shatner, but his personality was more like Jackie Gleason's character. "Buford T Justice", LOL. I was cruising around the old neighborhood a few weeks ago and he was outside working on his truck so I stopped and talked to him. He ain't changed a bit. And when I told him he reminded me of Buford T Justice, he laughed his ### off and said he hears that all the time. He's retired now, but he still made a point to mention that my license plate sticker was expired.

 

I miss those roads sometimes... US 95, US 395, CA 89 up through Nevada and Northern California. I like it up there, and I might just have to volunteer for a run that way sometime. For now, I'm still basking in the novelty of getting home more than once every two weeks. I know that getting out there will mean I need to spend two weeks on the road. Given that once-upon-a-time I was out for 4-6 weeks at a time, it's not like it'd be particularly hard to do, but then again, I didn't have two kids then.

 

Hey thanks to the Van Wyk guy that showed me how the eLogs work on the qualcomm. That was very cool.