Shippers take holidays? Who knew?

As small-town truck stops go, this isn't bad.

It's a "fuel and forget," but there's a fast food place (as many of them have) and a place to sit where you can plug in your laptop (as many of them don't). And the folks are friendly.

Just as well. I'm gonna be here a while.

After dropping off my last load, I sat for an hour or two, waiting for the next load's info. After all, it was a holiday weekend. No sense in nagging my dispatcher. This turned out to be a mistake. I got to the shipper 45 minutes past the end of my pickup window.

Embarrassing, but usually not a serious problem. This time, though...

The lumberyard was silent. Nothing moved. The parking lot was empty, except for one pickup, next to the office door. One vehicle right next to the office usually means a security guard. And sure enough, here he came. "They hung on 'til quittin' time," he said. "Couldn't make the guys work over on New Year's Eve, though, could they?"

Suppose not. So when would they be opening tomorrow?

"Tomorrow? It's a holiday weekend. They'll be opening back up Tuesday morning."

(In case you missed it, this is Friday night.)

Oh, well. At least I might get to church Sunday.

And I'll have some time to think.

Let nothing you dismay...

I knew I wouldn't be home for Christmas.

They offered to route me in, but I would've lost a day or two's pay. Last year I would have taken them up on it. But there isn't nearly as much reason to come home these days,* so I let it slide. Besides, they were having enough trouble getting people home who really needed to be.

So, on Christmas Eve I got up, had a hearty breakfast. I knew I had time for a hearty breakfast, since my next load could be picked up anytime in the next three or four days. And you never know when your next leisurely meal will be possible. so why not take the time?

Having enjoyed the food and the warmth, I trundled down the road to the next town and pulled into the appropriate factory.

It was closed for the holidays.

Now why did that surprise me?

No matter. This was a problem. You see, I wasn't going to be home for Christmas, but I was scheduled to be home sometime the day after. The irony of this aside, it really was important for me to get there. I've discussed the way this slip seat thing works before, so I'll just cover the relevant part now: If I don't get home on time, the next driver can't take the truck out on time. My extra time on the road cheats him out of his time on the road. Not acceptable, if I can avoid it.

So I gave my dispatcher the good news, and he set out to find me another load. No problem, right? After all, it was the holidays. And I doubt he had more than five or ten times the normal amount of trucks on his board. Piece of cake...

It only took him half a day. And I managed to get to the customer just in time to get loaded, get out, and get a safe and proper distance down the road** before I had to shut down for the night. That only left us with one problem for the morning: I couldn't take that load to its destination. It was going way past my home terminal, and not exactly in the right direction. So I took it to the nearest place where my dispatcher had a chance of finding someone else I could pass it on to.

On Christmas day. Right.

After some thought, my dispatcher asked me if I had any suggestions. I did a little math and said something like "Well, I can get it as far as Atlanta, if that's not too far out of route."

He said something like "On Christmas Day? If it gets where it's going on time, there is no such thing as 'out of route.' If you get it there sometime before midnight that's fine."

I said something like "Sounds good to me."

Then I ate.

I had been planning on that anyway. Due to one of those obscure hours things, I wasn't going to be able to drive for a couple of hours anyway. So I'd managed to borrow a company car to go to a restaurant. Then the guy in charge of the car said, "Where are you going? There won't be a restaurant open anywhere in town, you know. It's Christmas."

I felt so foolish.

Then he said, "You do know there's gonna be Christmas dinner here in an hour or so, don't you?"

What?

Turned out a driver who lived in the area was bringing dinner for any driver stranded at the terminal. And he'd be there before I could take the truck out again. So why was I looking for a Waffle House or something?

I really didn't have a good answer. So I gave him back the key and got out my Santa hat.*** Then I had some of the best turkey I've had in a good while, with fixin's to match. Thanked the kind folks, got in my truck, and started south.

And that's why I was home for Christmas after all. An hour or two of it, anyway.

The first white Christmas in Atlanta since the Nineteenth Century, I'm told.

I'll take it.

----

*Now that I don't have a wife waiting for me. That's just informational, in case there are any newcomers. We won't dwell on it...

**For reasons that take to long to explain, some loads have special rules--like how many miles you have to drive before you can stop.

**Long story. Short form: it was the only warm hat I could find when I was heading out the door this week. At least it was the right season for it...

Oh what fun it is..

I'll be brief this time.

Plenty of things happened out there this past week or so, but most of them were variations on the same thing.

Driving in a winter wonderland.

That being the case, I thought I'd just toss out a few passing impressions.

Driving northward into a Kentucky that looked a lot like it did in the last entry.
The truck made three separate attempts to wander off and explore the snowy fields, but all of them were fairly halfhearted.

The third time was the only one that really stimulated the heart rate. I was trundling carefully through the night, headed for a truck stop and a good night's sleep (oh, please...), when I noticed a pickup parked halfway on the shoulder and halfway on the road. It's driver seemed to be thinking about some Good Samaritan work for the big black Chrysler that had just swapped ends and backed down a six- or eight-foot ditch. When I tried to slip around them, the truck decided that ditch looked like a nice place to spend the night.

Fortunately, as I said, it wasn't too insistent. But it made me quite glad I was taking my time and looking for trouble. I actually had time to discuss the matter.

I was also glad the warehouse where I'd just dropped a loaded trailer didn't have an empty. Straightening out in time might have been more complicated if I'd been driving a tractor-trailer...

Cold-weather fashion
I'm from far enough southward that the ladies don't put quite as much effort into nice outfits that keep them from freezing. From Indiana northward they seem to think about it more. I kept seeing neat, well-matched outfits--usually a miniskirt-length coat, a reasonably modest skirt, and tights. Most often, all three items were black, though there were variations. Warm and flattering at once.

Not very trucking-related, but it passes the time...

Washington, D. C. in the wintertime
Two hours to cover thirty miles on the Beltway. And it was a long way from rush hour.

'nuff said.

Modern conveniences
Got to a customer with twenty-odd tons of household cleaning products, and parked in an out-of-the way place while I found out which dock I'd be backing up to. Got back to my truck, put it in gear,

and listened to the wheels spin.

I had to borrow a snow shovel and a bag of salt to get out of the parking space. Most embarrassing. The truck has an anti-skid traction control system--which had apparently quit just before I got here.

There's something to be said about a gadget, made to keep you from slipping on the ice, deciding it won't work in cold weather. But I won't say it. Ladies may be reading...

* * *

Then I came home, the week a blur behind me. Two days in a place where water would't freeze if I leave it outside. Perhaps it's just as well I go back out tomorrow. I'm getting spoiled down here...

Kentucky was kind of white this week...

a LITTLE tight...

When I was a very small boy, I picked cotton a few times. Occasionally I'd ride to the cotton gin (Forget your hayride—sink into a trailer full of fresh cotton sometime. Now THAT's cushy!) and watch it being sold, and vacuumed out of the trailer, and run through the gin and baled. It was noisy and strange and lots of fun.

Today I took my truck to a cotton gin in the middle of nowhere. There I backed into a dock and walked past a row of strange noisy machines looking for the office. In the office I got my bills of lading and returned to the truck, walking past those noisy things again on the way.

The gin machinery looks more or less the way it did when I was far younger. I wasn't expecting that. Granted the technology is nearly 200 years old now, but I was still a bit surprised. It really hasn't changed much at all in the last 50.

They wrap the bales in plastic now. In my youth they used a sort of cloth covering, so coarse you couldn't tell whether it was more like a tow sack* or a net. That seems to be the biggest change in the last generation or so.

I recognized it all. And I'd forgotten it until today.

Especially I'd forgotten the smell. Freshly-picked cotton has a pleasant smell. Kind of like a bakery, in some ways. But not quite.

Getting there was an adventure. I've discussed the joys of GPS forever. I may have mentioned that the customer directions can be almost as much fun. Sometimes this is because they don't know what they're talking about. Other times they don't know how to get it across.

Then there are the times when they forget I'm not coming in a car.

It never occurs to most people that a road looks very different when you're in a vehicle that's 80 feet long, 8 ½ feet wide, 13 ½ feet tall, and weighs anywhere from 15 to 40 tons. Sometimes this leads them to lead you under 12-foot overpasses, or around hairpin turns, or through peaceful residential neighborhoods with watchful police officers.

In this case, it led me up a two-lane county road in which each lane was EXACTLY the width of my tractor-trailer. As in, my wheels were touching the painted stripes on both sides of the truck. And there wasn't a shoulder to speak of

And that was on the straightaways. A truck takes up more of the road on a curve.

Then, just about the time I had gotten used to watching the mailboxes skim by in mute terror, and the cars and farm tractors trying to find enough shoulder to give me a wide berth, I saw the bridge.

Ordinary looking little thing. The interesting part was the sign that said “WEIGHT LIMIT: Tractor-trailers, 27 tons.”

Empty, I weigh between fifteen and twenty tons.** No problem. But when I came out, I was going to be closer to forty.

It bore thinking on.

Fortunately, the nice lady in the gin office knew a more sensible way out. She said she didn't even give the route I'd followed to cars—at certain times of the day you spend all your time stuck behind John Deere's.

So who had given it to us? I wondered. But since it obviously hadn't been her, I didn't ask.

I thanked her politely and went back to the truck. Walking slowly. Breathing in fresh cotton.
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*Tow is a material made from what's left over after you've turned flax into linen. It's strong, rough, and scratchy. Nobody wants to wear the stuff, but it makes a pretty good material for heavy-duty bags. Old-fashioned potato sacks or feed bags, for instance...

**I mean, the tractor, the trailer, and I. Honest, that's what I mean...