CRETE - A Year in Review

2008​

WEEK SIXTEEN​

Monday, April 14th through Sunday, April 20th​

Well, it's Monday morning, my reset is complete and I'm ready to start my new week with a fresh 70hrs. Hopefully I'll be able to put in another 3800mi week.

I had run out of hours Saturday and found myself in Knoxville. That left me with a little over 200mi left on my run to Atlanta with a late morning appointment. I started the day at 4:30am so I would have time to stop for fuel and leave myself some extra time incase Atlanta traffic decides not to cooperate (never know what to expect around that town).

I cut things a little closer than I like, but arrived about 1/2hr before my appointment. It turns out that being late wouldn't been a problem because they had me sit in their yard for over an hour before I was given a door. At least it didn't take too long to get unloaded once I bumped the dock.

I had put in an early MT call in anticipation of a possible delay in the Qcom messages that have plagued me lately and was given a one load offer to Houston (917mi). Since freight has seem to picked up in the area I wasn't too concerned about going over there but I was less than thrilled about the delivery time. It was an appointment delivery and it wasn't due until Wednesday at noon. This simply doesn't work for me because I will be running my 11hr days and will find myself there by early Tuesday afternoon and then have to sit around in a truckstop for 20+hrs. I guess I could just run 8hr days and avoid the one long term downtime, but then that's not my style.

I went ahead and accepted the load. I know that we have a drop yard in Houston and will try my luck at a Tcall when I get there; the whole trick is to get there ASAP so that I will have a reasonable excuse to dump the load early.

I was surprised to get my load info within a couple of minutes and was able to figure out where the next shipper was and plan out my trip while I waited for them to finish unloading me.

Once empty, I did a quick D/H PU just up the road and was on my way down the road. I was able to get another 300 miles down the road with a quick stop at my favorite hole in the wall truckstop in Tuskegee to pickup some awesome Cajun boiled peanuts. I have only recently discovered these wonderful little treats and will never drive by without stopping for my fix.

Tuesday has me looking at 550mi or so to Houston. There is no real reason to hurry and I could sleep in, but I have a Tcall in the back of my mind and get an early 4am start. This gets me to Houston at 2:30pm. Time to see if I can pawn this load off (I didn't really expect a positive response).

I grab the Qcom and shoot off the following message. "I'm in the Houston area and my load doesn't deliver til tomorrow. I have till 6pm before my 14hrs are up. Would it be possible to Tcall so I can keep moving? I can Shag a local load if it will help you out or re-power one. Let me know if you have anything".

I always offer to help out with a shag when Tcalling, even if they don't need any help, it lets them know that I'm willing to pitch in. They seem to be more willing to work with me if when I do this. Occasionally they do call me on it and give me a shag load, but I'm always happy to be moving instead of sitting under a stagnate load.

I had been sitting for 20mins or so and had resigned myself to spending the night at the Pilot when a received a message telling me to head on over to the drop yard and see if there are any empty trailers available. I'm thrilled and head on into town to learn my fate. I'm not out of the woods yet. The fact that they want me to look for an empty means that they have uncovered loads in the area, but if I can't find an empty I'd be out of luck. I cross my fingers and hope for the best. After a wrong turn and a nice tour of places where trucks shouldn't be I found the drop yard and could see 3 Crete trailers. What are the chances that one of them would be MT. Not to good as it turned out. If I were a Shaffer driver I would have been in good shape, plenty of those.

I did a quick check of the BOL for loaded trailers. Two were local deliveries and the other was going to IL and delivered Thursday. Looks good to me and I sent a message off to dispatch to let them know there were no MT trailers, but I could re-power the IL load. This was answered with "That load is assigned, wait there for the driver picking up that load and take his MT trailer, he will be there in an hour or so".

I've been in this business long enough to know that means 2-3 hours. Not too good because that would be getting too close to my 14hrs for the day. But then I realized, the only way dispatch would know how far away the other driver was would be by checking the Qcom position. These location signals are sent out by units every hour or so and I figured that means he was probably much closer. Sure enough, five minutes later he pulled into the yard and I had my MT. Life is good, for now anyway.

I informed dispatch of our good fortune and immediately received a two load offer. I went with the D/H load with a 110mi deadhead that had an open delivery to Indiana on Thursday. Sure beats sitting in a truckstop for the night. That's how you get the good miles at Crete. If you put some effort in, it often pays off.

On my way into town today, I noticed that East bound traffic by Beaumont on I-10 was horrendous due to construction traffic and there is no way I would get through it without running out my 14hr clock. I chose to take an alternate route which took more time than planed and although I would be able to make it to the shipper, I would only have ½ hr left in my day. This shipper was in the middle of nowhere and I would never be able to find parking if they didn't have overnight parking.

The load assignment let me know that I was picking up a preloaded trailer and it was ready to go. This was also a 24hr customer so I shut down at the Petro in Beaumont and let dispatch know that traffic held me up and that I would get the load in the early AM and would have no problem delivering the load on time (I had an 08:00-20:00 window). This was answered with an OK and I headed over to Joe's Crab Shake for some legs.

I started Wednesday at 3:30. I didn't have too, but an early start will be an early delivery in Indiana Thursday and a sure thing at getting another load to keep me moving. Again, this is how you get the miles.

My pick up was supposed to be a quick D/H but ended up being a pain in the butt. To start with, when I arrived they were in the middle of a break. No trucks in or out and I had to sit 15mins while the guard ate his sandwich just so he could push a button and wave me in and point to the shipping door. Next I'm instructed to sweep out my trailer, even though I had done this the night before. They had to watch me do it. So I sweep out my clean trailer and waited for them to inspect it. Ten minutes later someone shows up to do so and tells me to drop the trailer by the fence. Around the corner I go to find a "fence". I find what seems like a "good" spot and start my blind back. With two pull-ups and I find myself set and when I'm halfway in I am assaulted with a blaring horn from the yard jockey. Apparently this wasn't the correct fence and I am rudely directed to drop the trailer by the other "fence" OK, I go back to where I stared and drop the trailer and head off to find my loaded trailer. As I am hooking to the trailer and checking tire air pressure I am extremely annoyed to see the very same "friendly" yard jockey putting my MT trailer in the exact same spot I had been chased off from. Holy crap!

The fun continues as I spend the next ½ hr trying to slide my tandems. I rarely have a problem with our trailers in this regard, but this one was making up for the others. I eventually found a curb I could hook the tandems on and was able to break them loose.

What should have been 15mins took well over an hour, but I finally managed to get out. I now needed to scale out, but of course, they didn't have one on property and my routing had me going north on two lanes with no truckstops for an extended period of time. I could find one once I made it to the interstate, but that was 20+miles out of the way and there was only one State Scale in TX along my route, and those back road scales are always closed (yah right).

As you have probably guessed, when I arrived at the scale it was open and I had a 46,000# load that I had eyeballed when adjusting the tandems. I cross my fingers and pull into the scale. Luck is with me because the scale master had two drivers in the chicken coop and had the bypass light on. Shortly after, I was able to find a scale and found that I was only over on my tandems by 200#. A quick adjustment and I was back on the road.

The rest of the day was a peaceful drive and I actually had a little excitement (sort of). Now don't hold me to this, but I'm 95% positive that I saw a black bear today in the NE part of TX. I only caught a glimpse as I came around a corner, but I have spent a fair amount of time traipsing through the woods in my day, and nothing runs like a bear. I didn't think bears were in these parts, but that has to be what I saw diving into the woods.

Well, it's Thursday and I have 300mi left on this load. My routing has me running up I-69 out of Indy, but I decide to run up Hwy 31 straight north out of Indy to save 25 miles or so. As soon as I get on it I realize why I swore to never run this road again. It had been over a year since my last time and I had forgotten that there are at least 50 lights along this stretch and I hit 3 of them green. Talk about frustrating.

I had again started the day early and even thought they took there time unloading me I found myself empty by 1pm. This put me in a good position to get another load and put in some good miles for the day. I was offered one load that picked up 100 miles away in Indy at 3:30 and was destine for Mountain Top, PA (627mi) with a crappy 9pm appointment delivery the next day.

I had plenty of time to get to Indy, but this trailer decided to throw me another curve ball. Somewhere along the unloading process, a shock bracket snapped and the air adjuster was damaged. This resulted in the airbags being fully inflated. After spending a fair amount of time trying to repair the adjuster I had to give up. Well, there is no way I can get this trailer loaded as is. With that in mind I headed toward Indy (via I-69, no more Hwy 31 for me) and hoped I could find and MT trailer in our yard and drop of this one so the shop can get to it at their leisure.

I now found myself on a very tight schedule and didn't want to be late for my PU. A quick stop at the yard and a search for an MT worked out, I was in luck, there was one MT trailer. I grabbed it and headed over to the shipper. I was 15mins late, but as I pulled around the corner I quickly realized this was the end of my day. There were around 20 trucks in the docks and at least 20-30 trucks staged and waiting to load. My 14hr clock would end here. Two hours later I was given a door and three hours after that I was finally loaded. Our yard was only 5 miles away, so I headed that way and put in for the night.


Since I was unable to run any miles off this run due to the loading delay, I now had to run the whole 630 miles on Friday. The trick was to start late enough in the day to have enough time to find parking after my unload, but not so late that I would be late in the event of an unexpected delay.

I decided to set the alarm for 5am, but this turned out to be unnecessary because mother earth decided to shake me out of the bunk around 4:30am. Who would have expected an earthquake in Indiana? That's one strange way to be awoken. Sure gets the adrenalin going.

Off I go and arrive at the consignee about 45mins early. With the time it took to unload (they didn't have any MTs and I had to live unload) I was too short on hours to do anything so sent a message to dispatch that I was out of time and asked for a load for the following morning.

I got another one load offer that was a D/H PU and ready to go, heading to Chicago (723mi) with a Monday morning deliver. I could get it in the morning after 7am.

This worked out great because I was down to 14hrs on my 70 clock. I could PU the load first thing Saturday morning, run it to Chicago and shut down for the rest of the weekend and get in my reset. The only problem with this load is that it was on a Shaffer trailer. It was a dry load, but meant nothing but trouble for me after my unload Monday morning. As long as I'm hooked to a Shaffer trailer, I would be getting no drop/hook loads and had to worry about getting a refer load that means dealing with more problems than I care to deal with. I've done my time as a refer hauler and have no desire to do it again. Oh well, I'll worry about it next week. Maybe I'll be able to drop it in our Romeoville yard and find an MT Crete trailer there (yah, right).

Look Ma, I'm a Shaffer driver



Saturday was spent driving to Chicago. I wanted to run Hwy 20 to stay off of the Toll roads to save the company some money, but I had 695mi to run and if I didn't stay on the Toll roads I wouldn't be able to make Chicago for my reset and I had no desire to spend a reset in the middle of nowhere (I had grand plans).

I make it to Chicago with 3 hours left of my 70hrs and another great week that I can close with a reset.

Once in Chicago, (the Pilot in Gary, IN actually) I shut down and went to work on the computer. The Cubs were in town and I have never been in Wrigley.

It took a couple of hours to make sense out of everything, but after studying the Indiana and Chicago transit websites I had my plans made. I printed up the appropriate schedules and a map of downtown Chicago and I was set. Oh yeah, I also printed out my ticket to the Cubs game for Sunday afternoon.

The only stumbling block was that Indiana didn't have any buses running on Sundays, so I would have to walk about 2 ½ miles to the train stop. I guess I could have called a cab, but I like a little exercise. I hind sight, a walk through Gary, IN probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but how much trouble could I get into on a Sunday morning.

The train was on schedule and I handed over my $4.50 and was in downtown Chicago an hour later. Now all I had to do was find the Red line subway. This took a little wondering around, but I eventually found it. The subway booth attendant seemed to be extremely annoyed when I interrupted her personal phone call, but I had no choice. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I finally figured everything out and 7 stops later I was one block from Wrigley.

That town sure knows how to have a good time on game day.



Now this is a great way to do a reset.



WEEK SIXTEEN RESULTS
Monday, April 14th through Sunday, April 20th
Miles include deadhead



Knoxville, TN to Union City, GA(last leg)..........................218mi
Winder, GA to Houston, TX...........................................917mi
Evendale, TX to Wabash, IN........................................1161mi
Indianapolis, IN to Mountain Top, PA..............................727mi
Hazelton, PA to Gary, IN(first leg)..................................684mi

Total Paid Miles..........................................................3707 Miles
Actual Miles...........................3791 Miles


3707mi x .42 = $1556.94


It looks like the out of route miles are under control, less than 90 for the last week and the miles are coming strong with a little extra effort.

I have run 7617 miles (3910 + 3707) in the last 14days and will start next week with a fresh 70hr clock.