Wednesday, August 24, 2011

New England Wind Farm & Tractors from Burlington, Iowa

Delivered lumber to Claremont, NH, on Monday, then parked at a restaurant in nearby Vermont to look for a load out. Cathy finally found us one through Landstar loading outside of Sheffield, VT the next morning, so we drove most of the way, then parked for the night in the tiny town of Sheffield, and drove in to the RMT staging yard in the morning.

We went up to the Wind Farm site in a convoy of three trucks, following a pickup who was turning aside downhill traffic for us, as the road up to the wind farm was narrow and gravel. It was so bumpy that I'm convinced that is why we didn't feel the earthquake (yes, an east coast earthquake) that happened later that day. There was a total of four trucks getting loaded with containers bound for Cedar Rapids, IA. We got to talking with one of the other drivers about the way out of there - Sheffield is pretty close to the Canadian border - and he, a native New Englander, offered to let us follow him out by the route he had chosen. The route was hilly and wound through it's way down to New York, and the I-90 Thruway, but we saved 100 miles over the other two trucks who took the I-91 down to the I-80 and went across that way. Of course, we had to pay tolls on the 90 as well as the 80.
 
We were wishing it had been a little further into Fall, so we could have seen the much-hyped New England Fall Foliage season.
 
We left our New Englander guide and drove straight through and delivered our container to Clipper Wind in Cedar Rapids about 1:00 in the afternoon. Cathy got us a load out of Burlington, IA but we had to get there before 2:30 if we wanted to get loaded out same day. We were 1/2 hour late, and had to wait until morning.

In the meantime, since it was 100+ degrees and only 3:00 pm, we decided to get a hotel room. We ended up staying at the Pzazz Inn & Resort, which included several restaurants and a casino. We gambled a bit, and drank - though the drinks we not free for gamblers - and I made my first call for room service. But what did we order? Pizza. May as well have called Dominoes. : (

In the morning we picked up two tractors from Case New Holland, brokered through Landstar via Cathy, bound for two drops in Texas.

Since there wasn't any interstates going the way we neeeded them to go, we took some back roads, most of which were in quite good repair. Hwy 27 from the IA/MO border down to Hanibal was under construction a lot, but it was mostly 4 lane divided, and Hwy 54 going between Mexico, MO, past Lake of the Ozarks, and down to I-40 was really nice. Hwy 75 started out rough, but when it merged with Hwy 16 it was really nice.