Reely Spooly

Drove to Malvern, Arkansas to pick up 5 reels of cable bound for Oregon. Four to be delivered in Prineville, one to be delivered to Portland. An opportunity to go home and put the truck into the shop for some pressing work that needs to be done.

It took better than 3 hours of waiting before we could get our reels loaded, but we got them chained down - again we have the 'one chain short' issue we will have to remedy when we get home. Because of the lateness of our departure, and the Prineville customer not being ready, we won't deliver until Thursday after lunch there, and in Portland on Friday morning. We should be home Friday afternoon.
 
After a crazy night of driving over the Blue Mountains in a pretty significant snowstorm, and then winding our way past John Day on Hwy 26, we arrived in Prineville about four hours later than we planned, but still three hours ahead of schedule. It was good that we had pushed on, given how slow the going was once we got into Oregon.

Delivered four reels to PacificCorp in Prineville, OR to a job site that turned out to be a new data center for facebook. It took a while for them to be ready for us, since it had recently rained and made the unloading area a soggy mess. They had to spread more gravel and grade it in order for us to get in without getting stuck.

While we were waiting, we happened to be sitting across the street from a place that makes custom tarps. They happened to have a set of nine foot tarps in yellow that a customer had failed to purchase after ordering, so we got them on sale. A nice case of being in the right place at the right time.

After we got unloaded, we drove over Mt. Hood in minimal snowfall, and spent the night near a mill in Boring, Oregon, before heading in to Portland to deliver the last reel to General Electric on SE 17th.

On the way home we crossed the Woodburn Scales and got pulled in for a random level one DOT inspection, which we passed, including the logbooks. A good thing for our SMS score.

We were home by noon. Ah!

Tight Fit

Drove to Barbour's Cut Terminal in LaPorte, Texas to pick up 4 tractors bound for Sulphur Springs, Texas. It was an interesting production, since we had to find and load our particular tractors ourselves.  I thought the guy was joking at first, but it was indeed up to us. We had to find our four out of about 30 blue tractors on the dock by looking at serial numbers, then get them loaded. The ramp they had available was a good foot shy of the height of the trailer, but we were able to climb them up with only a little difficulty.

Collin did all the loading, but I did get to drive one of the tractors up to the ramp. That was fun! We almost couldn't fit all four on the trailer. It was a very close fit, maybe an inch between tractors, and the front one's tires overhung the front of the trailer, and the back ones overhung the back. Chaining them down was a chore, too. Collin had to climb around under the tractors fussing with the chains, plus we were one chain short of doing a truly appropriate job, and had to use a strap in place of a chain on one axle. But we got it done.

Looks Like We Got Ourselves a Convoy

Loaded out at Sabre Galvanizing in Alvarado, Texas on the 14th, with a load of galvanized I beams bound for a solar project near Santa Margarita, California that wasn't going to deliver until Tuesday due to the MLK day holiday. We took our time to get to Buttonwillow, where we needed to meet the convoy. The road up to the site is very winding, and they had to shut the road down to opposing traffic while the convoy goes up. It was quite a drive. We couldn't leave until the convoy left, they were telling us it would be 3:00pm, which screwed us up for a partial load we were going to take to get us out to Terminal Island for a load on Wednesday.

Once we got down from the site, we spent the night up on top of the Grapevine, since we didn't want to go down into Long Beach until the morning.

Oh Hayl No!

Delivered lumber to Frank's Service in San Luis, Arizona, where we could have walked across the border into Mexico, then drove to El Centro, California to pick up more hay from Preece Farm, bound for Boyd, Texas.

This load out was the longest we have ever experienced. First the squeeze machine was 2 hours late, then it was a bit of a three ring circus with two squeeze loaders trying to load three trucks at once. Then the young squeeze driver pushed a bale off the front of our trailer, which compromised the integrity of the whole front stack, and it took two hours to figure out what to do. We ended up removing about 18 bales to stabilize the front stack.

We were running so late that Brent, our customer who happened to be there to watch the loading operation, gave us permission to not tarp, since the weather was supposed to hold good for an overnight run. We were pretty stressed, since we had to pick up our next load by 6:00pm the next day, and we were going to have to run straight through at close to max speeds in order to make it on time.

After hauling ass and getting routed around a fatal accident in Odessa, Texas where a four wheeler looked like it had been rolled into a burrito under a big rig, we arrived in Boyd at Southwest Hay Exchange about 3:00pm, and found out that we needed to be at our reload by 5:00pm, not 6, and we still had to get unloaded, then drive 30 miles to drive in DFW rush hour traffic. We called the shipper, who told us we could get loaded on Saturday morning. Whew. That took the pressure off.

We hung out at the Love's in Rhome while to traffic died down, got some tires we bought from Brent installed and took showers, then drove to Sabre Galvanizing in Alvarado, Texas.

511

Delivered grease canisters to Mills, Wyoming, then drove to PolyPipe in Evansville, Wyoming to pick up very large gauge pipes bound for Pomona, California. Back to SoCal. In Park City, Utah, we learned that I-15 was closed at the Arizona border. After calling 511, we learned that there was a 'police incident' that was keeping it closed for an extended period. We took a chance and kept heading in that direction, acting on the hope that the incident would be cleared by the time we got there. The further we got, we learned that a bank robbery suspect had committed suicide in his car, and the police had subsequently discovered some suspicious boxes, and they thought it was hazardous material - seriously hazardous. We ended up taking a detour from Cedar City over to Caliente, then back down to the 15 just north of Las Vegas. We only added about 75 miles, and two hours to our journey.

Belle Chasse Ferry?

Drove to Koch-Glitsch in Wichita, Kansas to pick up crates and trays bound for Alliance, Louisiana. The load wasn't ready until after 4:00pm, but we didn't get out of there until 5:30 local time, and had to be in Louisiana by 11:00am the next day. Made for a push to get there in time.

We drove through the night and made Conoco-Phillips in Alliance by 8:00am. Had some issues with the GPS thinking we couldn't go where we needed to go, because it had intel that said there was low clearance on the side of the canal we needed to be on, but there wasn't. It kept trying to send us on a ferry over the canal. Really? A ferry?

Getting through the gate at Conoco-Phillips was a bit of a time sink. We had to watch a safety video, and show our TWIC cards, and we were told that Collin would have had to shave off his beard if we were going any further in than the warehouse, due to fire safety concerns.

Drove back into Belle Chasse proper, to Tube Spec, to pick up our biggest load ever, a single pipe, about 15 feet long, and 2 inches in diameter. We were taking this pipe all the way to Arroyo Grande, California, and it didn't have to deliver until the 9th. So we had an easy run ahead of us.