Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Blizzard With a Side of -27 Please

Cold week on last week's run. It was a beautiful 70 degrees in Vegas where we spent the morning with our boss getting our new computer system hooked up in the truck. The old system kept crashing every time it updated itself, so we have been going back and forth with paper logs. The new system is awesome and it's so nice to receive all of our orders again and our elogs are once again working great. We left Vegas around 2 pm and headed up to Cedar City, UT. It certainly didn't take long for the weather to change.  We knew it was coming so it wasn't a big surprise, I was just hoping to get to Salt Lake to load first. I really don't mind driving a tanker empty, but as I headed north of St. George, the wind was horrific. It started to rain and then turned into frozen little pellets of rain and with 5 miles it was a full on blizzard....sweet. You just don't have the traction like you do when ur carrying 45000 lbs. But on the plus side you also don't have that weight behind you pushing you down the mountain passes. Slow and steady goes the ship...I got away from everybody and made my own pocket and creeper along at 35 mph. By the time I got to Cedar City I had seen three semis flipped over on the side of the freeway, and the chatter on the CB from the southbound drivers wasn't any more promising heading north. I decided I was going to shut it down and pulled into The Loves in Cedar City. Now this is one of the many reasons why I love this job. First of all I knew none of the northern stores were going to run out of product that we were heading to if I decided to shut down for the night and secondly...the best part...When trucks start pulling off the road into truckstops due to weather, it's normally mass kaos. Trucks fill the spaces quickly and it becomes a cluster because drivers start parking anywhere and everywhere. I pull into the kaos with my flashers on and pull right up in between the building and the first pump, set my brakes...hmmm..yep this was my spot for the night. Almost like it was reserved for me...oh wait a minute...it is reserved for me. A great benefit driving a Love's truck.

The next morning looked much better and we made it up to Salt Lake to load, then to Wells, NV store at 9 degrees during the drop, back to Salt Lake to load, then took care of the Salt Lake City store and got reloaded to head back down to drop it where we began at the Cedar City store. We then headed empty up to Reno, NV to load. It was Thursday afternoon and we had to get to Reno by Friday to load for two reasons.  1) The supplier isn't open on the weekend and 2) Cleon was finished dumping, but Deon was due on Donner Pass by mid afternoon. So instead of taking the long way back up through Salt Lake and heading west we decided to take a short cut directly west from Cedar City heading northwest on 2 lane roads that had no maintenance on them at night and open range. What a great idea. As I drove in the darkness listening to my husband snoring away I wondered how many passes we were going to be going over by the time we got there and then there they were...cows... steers...lots of them. Just standing on the highway in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the pitch black of the night.  I don't think i have ever seen such huge livestock before. They literally came up to the top of the radiator and looked at me like...what are you doing here? What am I doing here? I thought, why aren't you in a warm cozy barn or something...my gauge on my truck said it was -27 outside.

I handed the truck over at midnight in Ely, NV. I warned Jeff about the passes and free range and mentioned he might just want to take 93 north to Wells. The last thing I remember is him pulling into a Chevron in Ely. I woke up in Reno when he was getting loaded...good sign there. He told me that the kind man at the Chevron told him to take the 278 at Eureka up to the 80. My suspicions were spot on, the last pass before Reno on the route we were on was 8% going up and 6% coming down. Jeff said the 278 added 82 more miles, but he only arrived 20 minutes after we initially planned with the original route. Nuff said.

We dropped our load in Fernley, I made it over Donner before the next storm hit, loaded the truck in Stockton and made it to the Corning store...where it was snowing, and the 5 north of there was closed for the night.

The truck did awesome in the snow and ice It wasn't really a bad week, just cold.  But I guess we got to enjoy that with the rest of the nation.

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