Millis OTR journal

Which truck number?

 

Indeed she is thank you

 

thank you

 

A cold beer hits the spot in any case.

 

Drink one for me!

For me, today was kind of fun, yet mildly frustrating. I got to revisit the very first place I ever delivered to with my trainer back in March. Have any of you ever been to Appian Manufacturing in Columbus? They make parts for John Deere that we take down to Kernersville, and bring racks back. It's a pretty tough little dock to get into. It took me forever and 289234 pull-ups the first time I was there, but today it only took 3 or 4.

What was frustrating is that I got up super early (by my standards anyhow) to try to get the load I brought to Columbus delivered early so I might stand a good chance at getting a good load out of there on a Friday. I put in my empty call at 0930 and sure enough Pat had me a reload 11 minutes later. Problem was that it didn't load until 1400 and they probably wouldn't take me any earlier. I show up at around 1330 and was told to park and wait because the load wasn't ready... which I did. 1400 comes around and load still isn't ready, and I'm already running up against my 14 hour clock. I think they finally came out and had me dock around 1515. Fortunately it didn't take them long to load me, but it didn't leave me a lot of time. Then I hit a big traffic back-up on US33 just south of Columbus that further wrecked my clock. So here I am, hardly 50 miles away from where I picked up, camped out for the night in a rest area.

On the bright side, I have been instructed to drop this load off in Eden and I have a pre-plan for a load out of there up to Miller in Milwaukee. I'm not a big fan of US220 in VA (or pretty much any US route in VA for that matter) but there's worse things.

 

Yep VA (both) isn’t my favorite place either. Nice pre plan though

 

I'm from West Virginia and while yeah we have mountains and curvy roads and I don't recommend venturing too far from the known truck routes when you're in a truck unless you really know what you're doing and where you're going, I'll say this much: At least our friggin' 4-lane US routes have nice wide lanes and shoulders.... probably because none of them were built until the late 70s and later. Virginia's US routes look like they're stuck in the 50s. Have you been east on US-460 between Christiansburg and I-77 yet? There's one section of that, in particular, that's terrible. If you take it in the right-hand lane your trailer is inches from cliffs and rocky overhangs.