Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Just left Walcott Iowa and the worlds biggest tourist trap. On my way to Fife Washington.

 

I’ve been stopping there since the 80’s when the fuel island was alongside the main building and the off ramp. The days when you pull up to the pump, give your info to the fuel guys, they’d pump it, do a walk around, clean the windows then pull the truck forward. Now, it’s Tesla charging stations, buses filled with Chinese tourists that swarm the parking lot looking at all the American ingenuity, and waiting forever in the food court. But, it kills some time for a break and when the weather is nice, a good place to do some walking.

 

Made it up here to the Loves in Moses Lake Washington yesterday at 1600 and started my reset. 178 miles to the delivery in Fife. Will leave out at 0400 tomorrow. This is a regular customer that receives a full trailer load every week of Boars Head products from Groveport Ohio. Over the last 10 years I’ve been here about a dozen times.

This load gets off loaded, put onto an Alaska bound trailer and either gets trucked up to Anchorage of put on a ship. It’s very time sensitive. They give us a 2 day delivery window, Monday or Tuesday, because of winter weather concerns. If this was winter, there’d be no way I would be doing a reset.

This load also comes with a $10K fine if we miss the delivery schedule. Operations will move heaven and earth to make sure this load is on time. 2 winters ago I was on 80 in western Nebraska with a different load, and we had a truck with this load on involved with a two day panic attack because of bad weather and roads that was stuck in the Loves in Box Elder SD. We were 350 miles apart and they rerouted me up to this new driver to swap trailers with her. I made it up to her and swapped. Trailer made it to Fife as scheduled, and the last I heard she quit when she got back to Richmond.

 

I mustn’t be liked. I haven’t got one one call since I got this load assignment last Wednesday. But then again, as soon as I planned my load and knew what I was dealing with, I conveyed it to my DM last Thursday about my plans. Maybe they realize there’s a few drivers that know how to do this job.