Fun Fun Stuff

Yes I know I am the biggest slacker in the world. So sue me  We are still trying to get the hang of our driver logs. They are the biggest pain in the ass. We are supposed to be able to drive 11 hours a day, but we haven’t had 11 available hours to drive in a while. We have 11 hours driving, 10 hours in the sleeper berth, and then 3 hours for like fuel stops and rest stops. Then we have four ‘duty’ lines, so when we start driving, it puts us on line 3. Line 2 is sleeper berth, line 4 is on duty not driving, and 1 is off duty. If you don’t do it right, you can lose driving time and then you get in trouble for being late for your load. Plus, you want all the driving time you can get, because we get paid by the mile, not by the hour. I know, it’s kinda lame, and definitely hard to get used to. We are trying to not take any time off either, for many reasons. One, because we don’t get money if the truck isn’t rolling. Two, because sometimes it’s hard to get a load that takes you close to home. Some people don’t get to go near home for months at a time. Three, because we are trying to be able to take time off in six months for when we get married, we want to take two weeks off for our honeymoon, so we figure if we kiss ass for the next six months we can get it J We miss the families, and our baby so much, but this is what we have to do if we want a life someday. We want our own house, and kids, and cats. Hopefully we can be able to work locally in a few years after saving our trucking money, and when I team drive, we will be making a lot more.

Anyways. The last post was written when we were driving out of Oregon, heading to Wisconsin. So, we went North through Washington a little bit, and I got to see my bestie! It was only for like ten minutes, but I was so happy! She lives so far away so I don’t ever hardly get to see her, and I was glad Rick let me J that was when we were able to drive 11 hours a day. So I got to show her and her kids the truck, which we keep pretty clean compared to other trucks we’ve seen. It helps that I can vacuum while he’s driving though, and just clean while he drives, and he helps too a lot. Anyway. So after we said goodbye, we headed off to Montana. Ugh. Trucker’s nightmare, in my opinion. We went through it long ways, and it took us freaking forever just to get through. Yes, it was really pretty in some places, but so not worth how long the drive was. And we kept having to slow down because of the canyons. We drive slow uphill because we’re heavy (durr) but we have to drive slow going downhill too otherwise we could roll the truck. So it’s slow both ways, and hard to do without burning the brakes up unless you know what you’re doing. Lucky Rick knows what he’s doing, so I don’t have to worry about him rolling the truck. That’s how his dad died, so he’s overly cautious because of it.
So we finally after two days of driving made it to Fargo, North Dakota, which was the first state we got to go to that I’d never been in before. I’ve been in all the western states, plus Texas and Florida, so I was definitely excited to visit the East side. I’ve only read about the East, but never been there. We stayed the night in Fargo because it was our fuel stop, and the next day we started driving again. (Sorry, all the days go really fast and run together so it’s hard to keep track of what day it is and how long we’ve been out lol.) We went through North Dakota, which I’m sorry, was boring as hell. We hit some fog, which was pretty exciting, but the rest of the state was filled with fields and hay rolls. I’m not kidding, there are more hay rolls than people in that state. I don’t think I got too many pictures, because there wasn’t really anything to take a picture of, haha. Finally we got to Minnesota, which I kinda slept through, because I wasn’t feeling too good, and it was night anyways, so we couldn’t see anything. Finally we got to Wisconsin, and dropped our load. Then we got another load to take to Illinois, so that’s where we were putting around for a couple days. Picking up trailers and dropping them off at other yards. It’s hard to remember all the loads we’ve done, because they switch stuff on us all the time. It’s cool if we get loads that are more miles, but when they switch and it’s a low mile job, it kinda blows. Oh well, that’s trucking for ya J
Driving through Illinois was interesting. First, the areas we drove through had corn field after corn field, with an occasional dilapidated farm and sometimes a creepy random cemetery. No kidding. It was very creepy and I was glad it was during the day and not at night. I still have yet to see a spirit walking on the highway, which is something I kind of want to see, kind of not. Morbid curiosity J Anyhoo, I really didn’t like driving through Illinois. We took an empty trailer from one city to another, and the wind going through the corn fields was pretty strong. When I was learning to drive, when I was like 15, I had a semi tip over in front of me going down Point of the Mountain, and it was very scary. It almost fully crushed a car, but thank god everyone was alright. I found out years later he tipped because he was empty. You don’t drive through extremely windy areas when you’re loaded, because you could die from tipping over. Common sense here. Anyways, the wind wasn’t too bad for us, just enough to freak us out a little. We got to our place seven hours early, and they would have loaded us but the night crew was in charge of our load so we just had to sit. It was alright, we ate at Ihop, and there was a little blue shack across the street that we walked to. The sign on it said “Over 21 Only,” which translates to us as dirty bad fun J we thought it would have a shitty selection of videos and a few magazines, but holy shit. There were so many videos there, we spent an hour looking around. They had other stuff too, and it was a pretty cool place! Beat the one in Evanston Wyoming for sure, and their place was three times bigger. After we finished there, we went down to the Walmart to look around. It’s so cool seeing the huge aisle of wines. Just wines. It’s still new to me, and I love it. And at the gas stations, there’s the lottery and power ball, and wine, and the alcoholic energy drinks, and Mike’s Hard Lemonade- basically all the good stuff that is banned in Utah. Sigh.
So we finally got loaded, then waited until morning to drive. This one was going to Wichita, Kansas. We learned first hand why they say to ignore the GPS and just use our Qualcomm (they communicate with us through it, send our loads and fuel routes, and other routes, through it to us. It’s like a really ghetto computer, it’s green and black, no color haha. Pretty handy.) So the GPS told us to go through this city, instead of the way we came, and we ended up going down one of those one way roads, and there was a bridge in our way. We were like, “oh shit, we probably wont clear it,” but there was really no way for us to turn around. Rick found a construction worker, and he tried to guide us under the bridge, but we were two inches too tall to get under, so we backed up. Eventually, Rick found an alley we could go down, and it took us back to the main road. Phew! We were really lucky, sometimes they have the police department and fire department close off the road for us, and they charge because it’s the driver’s job to not get effing stuck. So we finally got back to the main road, and off we went!
We’ve been in Kansas for the past few days now, and I have to say, I really like it here. Yes there are a lot of fields, and we’ve seen corn, random green fields, barley, and even cotton; but for some reason I just really like this state. The wind is bad here too, and we saw a wind farm with lots of windmills which was cool. There are random forests everywhere, random little towns, and random creeks and rivers. It is so pretty here though, and you can actually see for miles. I like not having stupid mountains block my view J now I just have to convince Rick to let us move here, hehe.
Yesterday we got to Dodge City to get a load of raw meat (I know, yummy) and it took us forever to get loaded. We talked to a bunch of other drivers from our company, and one guy had been there for a whole day and a half waiting to go get loaded. I guess it’s normal for meat loads, which we didn’t know before because we’re noobs, but now we know. So right now we are loaded with raw meat (don’t worry, this company hauls mostly refrigerated shit- the refrigerated trailers are mostly called reefers, and they run off diesel fuel so when they aren’t connected to a truck they still run, and they just run by themselves anyway. Pretty cool stuff!) and we are taking it from Dodge City to Westville, Indiana. They will unload some of it, then we are taking it to Oak Lawn, Illinois, and then some other place in Illinois. We have to go to all three locations in just one day! All within a few hours of each other. So, they better book ass when they unload us.
I’ll try not to slack so much next time, because then I forget stuff :/ soo yup! It’s been fun so far, it has been hard too, but mostly fun. I’ve gotten sick a few times and had to put myself in the back, but for the most part I’ve been up here with Rick.

Until next time,
Peace out
~Lola