Monday, July 23, 2012

Loving the New Gig & Home Time

So it has been a month now since moving over to Waggoner's and we couldn't be happier. We have finally gotten our new rythym down and are really liking our time in Oklahoma City as well as our quality time we now have in Denver and our home. We are running about 4,000 miles a week, sometimes less, if we take the backroads, and we are making more money. This job isn't about running your butt off for miles. We are paid by the leg....well paid. We can take any route we want, which is nice because we can break up the drive depending on our timeframe and mood. We no longer fuel at truckstops, we fuel at the terminal in Oklahoma City and that has been a nice change as well.

Our time in Oklahoma City is spent dropping our load in the am and then we don't reload our truck until 6 pm the same day. We have a place called home away from home that we go to where we can get out of our truck for the day. This is a house located on one of Waggoner's properties that is set up for drivers like us to enjoy. It has a kitchen, showers, bathroom and laundry facilities as well as 6 rooms for drivers to stay while they are away from their homes. We have our own room, which we have our TV and laundry and all of our belongings that make it a home away from home. It is nice to be able to kick back and be out of the truck and London loves the fact that he gets this time every other day. He meets other drivers and has made new friends. There are times when we show up that there is absolutely nobody there and we have a complete house all to ourselves for the day. Its quiet and nice and cool. This is such an awesome benefit to us in this job. We no longer have to go sit and camp out at a truckstop waiting for the beep to go off on our qualcomm for our next load. We know our schedule and can plan accordingly. Jeff usually leaves me at home away from home to get more sleep while he picks up the load at 6 pm. After he is loaded he comes back to get London and I, which I have made our pot of coffee and filled our thermos and we are ready to head back to Denver.

We also discovered that Oklahoma City is a place where so many of our driver friends from the past pass through. We have been able to connect with a bunch of people that we haven't been able to see in forever and have had time to sit and chat and talk about each others lives and spend some quality time. Recently we had a chance to meet Don who was passing through and was done for the evening. We haven't been able to sit down and talk with him since the old Wakins Shepard days in Helena, MT. It was awesome to catch up on our lives as well as his and London just loves him. Don is somebody we connected with immediately in our first driving job. He is from South Carolina and a true southern gentleman. He is a good soul and we both enjoyed our time we had with him. I love the fact that we know what our schedule is and that we control it. No more waiting for other people to control our destiny. We know what our job is and we get it done.

I have to say that the best part of our job is we no longer have a dispatcher. We receive our trip number via text message from the terminal manager in Denver and other than that, we hear NOTHING from this company. Our qualcomm has had 3 messages on it in a month, all about safety, and that is it! We are truly on our own to make our own destiny. Finally we are treated like adults and are left to just do our job and enjoy our time out on the road without any BS....so refreshing.



Wednesday, July 4, 2012

New Truck...New Job

We are back in business. We finished our first week of our new job and I have to say, I love it! We are now working for Waggoners Trucking on a dedicated route from Denver to Oklahoma City three times a week. We are running oil field equipment, mostly pipe, drills and big tool boxes. We now have a beautiful Kenworth W900 L long nose heavy haul truck with a 450 HP Cummins ISX with dual cams, and back to our 13 speeds (yaay)! This truck was used for hauling wind machine blades, you know those big huge things you see going down the highway? They took off the third axle in the back and walla. I still can't get over just how big this truck really is. I learned to drive a truck in a Kenworth and was not a big fan, as well as it was the first truck Jeff and I actually sat in at the dealership before we even starting driving a truck. It is much smaller up front than the Peterbilt or Freightliner and the floor space is much less, however the aerodyne sleeper with windows all the way around is the most spacious and comfortable sleeper we have ever experienced. We even have a pantry cupboard now!  The storage is great because we hardly carry anything other than food and clothes...no need, we are home every other day now and every weekend.

We also have a dedicated trailer again. No more wasting our time looking for trailers that don't exist. It is a flatbed, only 48', which is sweet for backing up and just easier to manuever. It also has fixed rear split axle tandems which has been a great thing in setting our loads up weight wise. Our heaviest load has only been 61,000 lbs. But the best part is that it is actually a curtain trailer. Once opened, it is exactly like a flatbed, functional for loading,and strapping, but once you close the curtain, which means absolutely NO TARPING, it looks like a soft-sided trailer. It also has a door at the nose of the trailer so you can step up on the catwalk and walk directly into the trailer to check your load, as well as a groovy light that lights up the entire trailer at night. We have some great storage boxes on it as well for holding all of our straps, chains and Cheater bar.

The back of the tractor has an awesome headache rack, which holds a multitude of tools and our tire chains. It isn't even halfway full with every tool known to mankind back there. Plus all of the boxes and headache wrack have locks, so no need to worry about anything getting stolen.

Next post I will talk about our groovy situation in Oklahoma City called home away from home. London is adapting to the new schedule, king of his domain already, and couldn't be more happy with his hometime.