The grinch that stole MY last Christmas.

This trip was one I'll long remember.
I was running a daycab for the last outfit I worked for last year in heavy hauling, because I had gotten elected to haul a gigantic portable crushing plant to Denver, and the daycab was the only rig with a 4th axle to legally scale the 125K lb. load. That stunk...no place to put nothing, and motels every single night.
I delivered the crusher, bobtailed back to Ohio in an icestorm across Kansas, and picked up a new dump trailer going to a dealer in Mass.
I then grabbed my lowbed again, and hauled an excavator out to Ohio, then this grader I loaded on the Saturday before Christmas. The grader was going to a dismantler/exporter in Baltimore to be taken apart, stuffed into containers and sent to the middle east.
Anyhow, time was tight, Christmas I think was on Monday last year if I remember right. I called the customer and BEGGED him to let me unload this thing either Sunday or Monday early, but they just laughed.
I ended up living in the Best Western across from the TA in Baltimore till Wednesday. Missed the holiday, and of all places to be stuck, that wasn't my favorite at all.
The upside was, there was a knock on the hotel door Christmas day, and the manager handed me a gift basket with a few goodies like a miniature bottle of some really bitter, awful tasting wine, and a few assorted cheeses and crackers. I cracked open the jug, ripped open the cheese and crackers and had me a jolly old time after all...Who says there's no Santa?

 

Thanks RBPC, should be good this year. Not going outside of a 250 mile radius of the kitchen table with this new job, so even if something went wrong on Christmas eve day, I could stick my thumb out and get back to the mountain in time.

 

I hear ya. Believe me, if I could have unloaded that puppy it would have been in their yard, because the place was certainly big enough. The problem was the batteries were shot and it needed a 24 volt boost, which I couldn't do without calling a service truck and having it cost the price of the load...if you could even find one with 24 volt capabilities on the holiday in downtown Baltimore.
The day after Christmas I pulled in and they took two big forklifts and picked the grader up, and I pulled out from under it in 5 minutes.
Damage wasn't an issue with this operation. They hacked everything apart with torches and stuffed shipping containers full of the parts, and let the people wherever it was headed worry about how it goes back together. This one was headed to Egypt, so I could just imagine the fun they were going to have re-assembling a 14G Cat grader cut apart with the hot wrench.