Day by day adventures of a new solo OTR driver

Well stuck here at Edwardsville today. After my slow start and wasted morning looking for an empty trailer, I still had a decent day yesterday. Today I finished running a load down into Missouri, then picked up a load out of there headed towards Kentucky. My first double drop and hook, that was a pain in the butt. The trailer I picked up had nothing left on one of the brake shoes on the rear axle, so I really had no choice but to run it through Edwardsville and let them take a look. Of course the trailer mechanic isn't here, so it won't be done until late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Only 300 something miles today, I wanted 400. I'm going to stop running so hard. I don't want to be taking 34 hour restarts or getting stuck running on recap hours and getting crappy shorthaul load after load. So if I get to 400 miles now, and the load allows for the time, I'm going to stop for the day. Kinda sucks when I can't even get to 400 though... oh well.

Hopefully tomorrow and the day after will be good days, I've got a preassignment from the customer I'm dropping at in Kentucky, so that should make things easy. That preassignment is a relay drop, so no set appointment times and I can hopefully work on keeping my hours up.

 

Well my plan to try to keep my hours up didn't go too well... lol. Schneider ran the CRAP out of me and I'm down to 5 hours now. But that's ok, I had some great runs.

I think last time I updated I was headed for Kimberly-Clark in Owensboro, KY. This is one of my favorite customers, I love the drive out there and although having to drop trailers on the scale, etc., is a bit of a pain and slows down getting in and out, I really do like this customer. I grabbed a relay that was headed for Ontario out of there after dropping my loaded trailer, and was taking it up to our yard in Michigan. Had a nice run up there, then got a preassignment picking up from Meritor in the middle of Michigan. Ran into another Schneider driver while I was there, we got to talking about where to stop for the night, I only had 4 hours left and did not want to run Schneiders route down 127 all the way through Ohio. This load was pushing my 70 down to nothing so I did not have time to play stop and shift 500 times on the 2-lanes. No way. Ended up taking his advice and running down 69, then taking US-30 all the way across to I-75. Stopped at the Flying J right where US-30 and 75 intersect last night, 509 miles to go still.

Drove with my foot on the floor all day today and made it to Meritor here in in Fletcher, NC. That was a long run, especially because I had to have it here by 1600 today and had to start my day at 0600. Not too much passed this Schneider truck today.

Talked to my DBL about taking a restart since I'm down to 5 hours now... I'm not regaining any hours tomorrow. For some reason I was assigned a load down to Florida which I didn't have hours for, so instead my DBL told me to call in tomorrow and after picking up that load, have it changed to a relay to the Charlotte OC and then take a restart. My pickup truck is there so I'll probably go home for a day, assuming everything works out and I actually get to Charlotte.

So, despite a real crappy start this turned out to be what is probably my best week mileage-wise since I started driving for Schneider. Despite only 160 miles on my first day out (I left out on a Friday), by today (Thursday) I'm sitting at 2963 miles. It'll get bumped over 3000 tomorrow by the time I get this load to Charlotte. NOT BAD. It'll be interesting to see what my actual paid mileage is... probably a bit more depressing lol.

Also, I should have bought a lottery ticket yesterday. Just one of those "eh right there looks good enough" tandem positioning guesses at the shipper after picking up those crates of axle parts from Meritor.