SKEETER HUNTING

Craig and I just spent the last 20 minutes skeeter hunting. Over the past couple of days/nights, we have acquired a vast amount of itchy bites all over our bodies, most notably, on our feet. Must be from hanging them out from under the covers while sleeping. We knew we had taken some additional occupants on board while at a rest area in Northern California, but thought we had extracted them all.......little did we know how wrong we were. With 30 minutes to go before our 10 hour break was completed, we played Elmer Fudd to the Buggs Bunny rascally skeeters and went a hunting. I think we have finally sent them all to the big swamp in the sky, but time and the appearance of itchy bumps will be the true test. Can you say West Nile Virus?????

Now back to our story...........Our deliveries went very smoothly in Spokane and Coeur d Alene, ID. With having been to these same four stores earlier, we knew exactly what approach to make to the loading docks, and in quick order we were done and back in the Company yard before our 14 hour clock had run out. We really didn't think we would get a dispatch until Saturday morning, so we took a nap and then were happy to now have a vehicle at the yard at our disposal. We jumped in our pick up and took off to downtown for some Japanese/sushi for dinner.

When we returned to the truck we saw the red light lit up on the computer and knew we had a message waiting for us. We were surprise to see that it was a dispatch to pick up a loaded trailer of chilled juice in the yard and deliver first to Redmond, OR at 8am Saturday morning. That meant we would be driving later that evening and we needed to grab a few more hours of sleep.

Leaving the yard at 11:30pm, we made our way towards Redmond. We had an interesting interaction with an Oregon DOT Officer at the weigh station just outside of Madras, OR around 7am. As we approached, and had our steer tires on the scale, the light went from green to red. Craig stopped, and I saw that the Officer was getting up from his chair and coming outside towards the truck. I rolled down my window and he hopped up on the truck and looked at me and asked, "Do you drive"? Without hesitation, I replied, "No", to which he rephrased his question and asked, "You just the passenger"?, and I said, "Yes". With that he stepped down from the truck and went back inside the building.

Now for a few miles, we were perplexed as to what that was all about, and then it dawned on Craig. He surmised that the DOT Officer was checking to see if I was a driver and then would have checked to see if Craig was driving on my log book. We hear it happens with couple team drivers, that one or the other will drive extra hours on the other's time. But, no worries here, and with a plausible answer to our question as to why we were stopped, we continued onto our delivery.

After unloading we decided to drive as far as we could for the day, since once the sun came up, we both got our second burst of energy and we made it to the rest area just south of Klamath Falls, OR. Right now it is almost 11:30pm and we are on the road again. Our last drop is in Stockton, CA, Monday morning at 5am. We decided to drive all night tonight in order to make it to Ripon, CA this morning, where my Mom will come pick us up and we can enjoy a home cooked meal this afternoon. With any luck, we just might be able to take back with us some leftovers, which is way better than a pesky mosquito anyday!