THE OUTHOUSE

You read from one of my earlier posts about one of the dirty little secrets of trucking......... that being the days that might go by before you are able to take a shower. Now here is the other dirty little secret......bathrooms. Each and every day, you plan when and where you might be able to use facilities. And if you are so lucky to have complete control over such functions, and to be honest with you.......sometimes you aren't, you can get creative real fast when nature calls. For fear of crossing that fine line of TMI, (too much information), I'll leave you to your own imagination to figure out what those creative measures might be.


So imagine my delight, (insert sarcasm here), when after our unload yesterday morning in Lathrop, CA, Craig pulls around to the receiving clerk door and parks right next to these: You can see in the bottom left hand corner the green color of the truck, and see just how close he was parked. While he was inside getting the paperwork signed, I had the "joy" of watching a non stop parade of truck drivers making the walk to these lovely outhouses. You can imagine how bad they must have been, when I watched several of the drivers open the door and then take a double look at what was before them, and then have that inner debate of whether to actually use it or not. Let's just say, I was very happy when we finally pulled away and went back to the yard, where I was able to use the facilities and not find out just how bad those outhouses were.

We were given the assignment to dead head to Salinas to Fresh Express, but not before fueling up the reefer unit, and washing out the trailer, and then dropping the trailer in their drop yard. Since we had not received a dispatch yet on a load, we found a great parking spot at the Pilot Truck Stop down the street and sat back to people watch for awhile. We quickly determined, as the minutes/hours went by, that a dispatch would not be forthcoming until Wednesday, so we settled in and made ourselves comfortable.

You guessed it! That was when the computer beeped and we were given the information on our load. But not to worry, the load was slated to be ready for pickup on Wednesday at 4pm, but it would be a tight delivery, as it needed to be in Auburn, WA, at the Safeway DC by 6am Friday morning. We accepted the load and settled back down for the rest of the evening.

This morning we are both happily on our laptops and will make the mile journey down to Fresh Express later this morning in hopes that the load will be ready early and that we can get a head start headed to Washington. Oh, and enjoy the fact that when nature calls, we have decent facilities to use inside the Pilot and not those "outhouses" I saw yesterday.