IT'S A BLUR

The last couple of days have been a blur of activity. We left Dunnigan, CA Sunday morning, thinking that we would get into the Long Beach area early and park at the receiver's address. We stopped in Santa Nella, CA at the Starbucks and noticed that one of the trailer tires needed to be looked at. This could put a damper on our great plan, but onward we went, with a phone call into road service and the TA truck stop in Buttonwillow as our destination.

Upon arriving there, they tell us it would take at least 2 hours before they can even take a look at it. That didn't set well with us, so we decided to take our chances with the Petro truck stop in Wheeler Ridge. I kid you not, we arrived and left, with a brand new trailer tire in less than 30 minutes! I was more than happy to fire off an email to their corporate offices telling them how great our experience was there.

So we were still on track to park at the receivers until we pull onto the dead end street and see very large signs stating no commerical truck parking allowed. This was a place we had not stayed before, so we weren't too comfortable throwing caution to the wind and taking our chances getting a ticket. So, we headed back to the little street we stayed overnight at in Vernon, which was about 10 miles away. After a good nights sleep, we took off in the morning to drop off the frozen french fries.

When we put in the empty call, we were instructed to drop off our pallets and head to the Company yard in Bloomington. Once at the yard, we had just enough time to use the restroom when we were beeped with our next assignment to pick up a loaded trailer a driver had just dropped in the yard and finish the run into Arizona. We quickly hooked up to the trailer, got the paperwork, and got as far as we could before our driving hours were extinguished, which left us in Tonopah, AZ.

Now this particular load had six, yes (6) drops all in greater Phoenix area at Fry's, they were 2 in Phoenix, 1 in Scottsdale, 2 in Mesa, and 1 in Casa Grande. The first drop was for 7am and the last scheduled for 12pm. Wouldn't you know it, we plotted and planned our route, and we were able to make all appointments ahead of schedule and were finished and celebrating with a Subway sandwich by 12:30pm.

Immediately we were dispatched again! Boy, freight must be moving because we have not had much time to catch our breath lately between runs. We needed to be in San Diego at 9am at the Port to pick up a load of bananas freshly off the banana boat. So, once again, we take off to get as far as our driving hours would take us and we ended up staying in Yuma, AZ last night.

Right now we are sitting at the Port, waiting to hear our truck number called over the CB so that we can get into a dock and get our bananas. We are low on driving hours, and as much as we would love to take this load up to my favorite place, Puyallup, WA, we will not have the hours to do that unless they change the delivery date. Since it has been changed several times before we even got dispatched on it, I doubt that will happen. Most likely, we will be handing this off to someone else to take the rest of the way to Washington.