ON THE GO

Oh boy.....where do I begin? We've been busy, and grabbing sleep when we can. Tuesday, at 3pm we were sitting at Darigold in Milwaukie, OR picking up over 40,000 pounds of dairy products. When we left at 4:30pm, we were not expecting what we found once we merged onto Interstate 205. It was basically a parking lot. Seems they are doing construction on the Glen Jackson Bridge, one of only two bridges linking Washington from Oregon, and with the commute traffic trying to get across those bridges to Vancouver, WA we found ourselves inching along with the masses.

When we finally made it the ten miles to the off ramp to Interstate 84, over a hour of our time had been wasted. We quickly scaled in Troutdale, OR and then headed towards Spokane for our delivery. We were under a bit of a time crunch, knowing that we needed to get in an 8 hour break, prior to our delivery at 9am. The drive was uneventful, and we found ourselves pulling into the Company yard in Spokane at midnight, with just enough time to get that 8 hour break, and some much needed sleep.

Moving again at 8am, we drove the last 25 miles to the receiver in North Spokane, and two hours later we were headed back to the yard, envisioning a lazy afternoon before getting our next assignment. Boy were we shocked, when we received a new dispatch as we pulled into the yard. With a mandatory two hour break looming ahead of us, we quickly did the math and decided to get at least a hour down the road before we shut down. The shutdown occurred in Ritzville, WA where we treated ourselves to a burrito for lunch.

After our two idle hours, it was off again to Kennewick, WA to Columbia Cold Storage for a load of frozen french fries. We arrived two hours ahead of our 6pm appointment, and then put in another 8 hour break, to allow us the pleasure of driving during the night to make our 6am delivery appointment in Auburn, WA. We tried to get some sleep, but you know the routine, and with maybe an hour or two, we were rolling again at 1am.

Our main goal today is to get ourselves out of the 8/2 hour split sleeper berth cycle and hopefully get some decent sleep before what will most likely be yet another overnight run back to Spokane. But you will not hear us complain if we get a reprieve and get a dispatch that will allow us to get back to a normal sleeping pattern again.