Tight places

The sky is gray.

I'm not paying much attention to it, though. I'm figuring out how to arrange the pillows to sleep tonight. The parking lot has a fair slope, you see. I won't say it'll be like sleeping in a recliner, but which way my head is facing will definitely make a difference.

On the good side, it's a bit warmer tonight. With any luck I won't wake up in the wee hours frantic to start the truck and burrow into the sleeping bag again. Always a good thing, this time of year.

Didn't get to talk to my wife tonight. The cell phone revolution is spreading fast--the nearest pay phone is a mile or so down the road. From a truck stop. Progress progresses, I guess. On the other hand, this truck stop had a rack of discount books, and one or two of them look quite readable. And cheap.

My pickup this morning was fascinating. Getting to it involved several tiny streets in the middle of a residential district. At two different intersections I had to take up both lanes of both streets just to get around the corner. If I'd followed my GPS I would have been arrested. (It does that to me sometimes.)

As it was, I drove right by the building. It couldn't be that one--there wasn't room to back in, was there? When I saw the "NO TRUCKS" sign a hundred yards ahead I stopped and looked harder.

Thank goodness there was a building right there, with a lot barely big enough to turn around in--if I was careful. So I turned around there--carefully. In the middle of the maneuver, a gentleman came out of that tiny place next door and waved me over.

It WAS that one. And there wasn't room to back in.

I backed in anyway. Not like I had a lot of choice.

In a way I was lucky. If I'd spotted it the first time I would have been facing the wrong way. The only thing worse than fitting that big truck into that tiny lot would have been doing it from the blind side. As it was, I only (!) ran the front wheels up on the curb of a school playground,* barely missed a parked car, and stopped with a foot of my front bumper sticking into the street.

Piece of cake.

The manufacturing facility wasn't much bigger than the parking lot. I missed it the first time for two reasons: 1)there wasn't a sign; and 2)it didn't look like you could manufacture anything in there. It looked more like an auto body shop. I've never picked up from a place quite that small before.

I suspect they'd never had something picked up by a rig quite this big before, either. "Is that a 53-footer**?" the forklift driver asked me. When I said yes, he shook his head. When he was done loading, he looked critically at the pallets and said, "More room than I'm used to. Is that a 102-incher?***" I said yes again, and he shook his head again.

Suddenly I felt a little better about the sweat I'd sweated backing in there. And the additional sweat I sweated pulling back out.

The rest of the drive was pure relaxation. In comparison.
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*but not over it. I never touched the grass behind it, I'm proud to say--much less the sidewalk.

**Most states won't allow a trailer more than 53 feet long without a special permit. A few states (like Texas) allow them to be a bit longer, and several require them to be shorter, but 53 feet works for most of the country. I've never pulled a trailer that was shorter except at driving school (they liked 46-footers for a lot of their training).

***102 inches (8'6") is the maximum width for a semi-trailer unless you get a special permit. Again, I've never driven in front of anything else. But until 1982 the maximum width was 96 inches. Progress progresses...