Millis OTR journal

I'm at the J in Knoxville tonight heading up to Trenton in the morning, so I'll get a little bit of mountain action myself. Not as majestic as Fancy Gap but I like Jellico. Some beautiful scenery up there. Too bad Tennessee made it where you can't park at that one exit right on top anymore.

 

I haven't been down that way in a couple of years. What did they do put up no parking signs? Super quiet and dark spot to take a break.

 

They put up a whole bunch of no parking signs and put big piles of rocks on the shoulder.

 

I take back what I said about Jellico not being as majestic as Fancy Gap. When we travel the same roads a lot I think we tend to take the things we see along the way for granted. Going across Jellico this morning I decided to pay more attention to the scenery than usual. This isn't even the prettiest time of the year and it's still amazing up there.

Today was a kind of interesting day. I'd picked up my load of 7 rolls of pulpboard/fiberboard from Cedar Springs yesterday and was told to drop the load in Trenton. Final was West Chester. So I did. Put in my empty and ready call an while I was backing under my empty, a new load came in. It was something from Cedar Springs that was sitting in Trenton going to guess where? West Chester. So I take my bills in for the load I dropped, pick up the bills for the new load. It's 7 rolls of pulpboard/fiberboard. The BOL # was one off from the load I brought up.

After I got empty, my reload was from the brewery. So I take my empty back to the Trenton yard, drop it, and head over to the brewery. The checkout line is backed up all the way to the back of the yard. I go hook up to my load, slide my tandems, and get in line. The line is moving, but slowly. After it gets down to where I'm the 3rd or 4th person in line to check out, it stops. Somebody gets on the CB and tells us what's going on. A Schneider driver was checking out, and she managed to lock herself out of her truck. Good grief. So finally they get some security people out and start having us scale out on one of the inbound scales. While all this is going on, some poor Werner schmuck turned into the employee parking lot by mistake, and got himself in a predicament trying to get turned around to get out. Somebody's having a bad day.

Meanwhile, my 14 is starting to wind down. I thought I would find parking here at that Love's on 70 just east of Dayton, but naw.....it's full. I had about 30 minutes left on my 14 at that point, so I didn't want to take a chance on getting down to the TA and it be full too, so I'm camped out on the ramp for the night.

This job is crazy sometimes.

 

Delivered my first full load today. Pick up in Sparta drop off in Holiday City. I hate ice. Sick of trying to drop trailers on sheets of ice.

 

Gets pretty tiring that so many shippers and receivers in the winter fail to maintain the lots that truck drivers have to operate in like it does not matter. Well to them it doesn't.

I take an extra issue with this after falling in an icy parking lot at a customer last March and breaking 3 ribs. They were literally out spreading salt around me as I laid on the ground in too much pain to move. Suddenly it mattered.