Party's Over

Great Bronco game on Sunday. Too bad Logan didn't make it to the ending...he really tried though, what a trooper! Fun time was had by all..Love being home to watch our Broncos.

Holiday Weekend

What a great weekend off. I was at the house by 9:30 am on Friday and we had all weekend until Monday evening. Football game, BBQ's and some great family time. Starting to not feel so much like a trucker anymore, which means our job doesn't consume our life anymore...been there done that. It's so nice to have that healthy balance back. Hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable end of summer weekend.

Dedicated Run...GOOD

Are we there yet?

I am so happy we made the decision that we did and went dedicated.  I love our job, but I had forgotten how much I love being home too. It truly is the best of both worlds...not to mention the fact the neither once of us has to drive more than 350 miles/day. We finally have the other side to our lives back that has been missing...not that traveling around all 48 states was a bad thing. We have been to every state, at least twice, which was something both Jeff and I wanted to do. Being home every other day is fantastic. We get to see our grandbaby, Logan as well as we can read our mail and sleep in our bed...that isn't moving. We have started talking about finally finishing in the garage and starting the kitchen revamp, the last of the great home projects on the list! I'm thinking next year I can even plant my flowers and be able to come home and take care of them. Nice to be back!

London has finally figured out our rhythm and he loves getting in the car and coming home to play with Diesel. He likes Oklahoma City when we go to our home away from home too. We have our own room and when we get there he has all of his toys and food to hang out for the day. It has finally started to cool off down there, so it has been nice to spend more time outside. 

PINK Power

We have been running from Denver to Oklahoma City and back for a little over 2 months now. We have taken I-70 to I-35 as well as I-70 to US 287 to all 2-lane back road highways. The latter is the quickest way, but its bull-hauling country...meaning that trucks pass by you at 80 mph in the dark, and I mean dark, and shake the hell out of you. We have been utilizing the back roads while the weather has been good. Its much quicker, and shorter, we don't get paid by the mile so the shorter the better! We have our normal stops but we would like to thank Tiffany @ The Love's in Lamar, CO for taking such good care of us every night...or morning. She makes a mean burrito at 3 am...love her. I know winter is upon us so the interstate will be the road of choice soon....we could always take I-25 to I-40 if we need to get out of a Colorado Winter Storm, it's longer, but we would be able to keep going if the weather cooperated. Here's to a mild winter...let it snow in the mountains and keep the plains ice-free....Hahaha, that's funny.

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.

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.

Good-bye US Xpress

Well....it's been quite a few interesting past weeks here.

We left Chicago 5-29 on a load and headed to Renton, WA and arrived on Thursday 5-31 at 1 am. After dropping the trailer at the customer we hooked to a dry-box, since that was all the customer had, and sent in our appropriate macros to end the trip. We had a pre-assign to MA, but were told we needed to find a reefer unit for this next load. To make a long story short we ended up spending Jeff's entire 14-hour day searching 5 different locations for a reefer trailer in WA, then ended up in the Portland yard, which surprise, surprise, no reefer trailers there either. We were to be in MA by Monday, the 4th, before the huge DOT push which started on Tuesday, 6-5...not a problem, except for the fact we had a 3000 mile load and no trailer to put the freight in. Our pick up was in Yakima and we were being pushed into telling the customer that we would be there by 5:30. Neither one of us were going to commit to anything until we had a reefer trailer attached to our tractor. Needless to say, that never happened. We decided that we couldn't pick up our load in a timely fashion and get to MA before Tuesday, so we had to call breakdown and get the truck in the shop. Our brakes were making funny noises coming down Snowqualmie pass. We called breakdown and got the authorization and then were accused of dodging the MA load. This became an ugly mess which lead to giving our notice that we no longer wanted to be in the reefer division for USX and wanted off that board and we would just start pulling dry-box loads. We came out on the winning end of the stick and after our truck was repaired we started on a dry-box load.

Our next load was picking up from the Oregon Coast and heading to Nampa, ID. Not exactly a Team run but miles are miles. We picked up our load at Georgia Pacific in Toledo, OR. What a beautiful drive down the 101 Oregon Coast. This was something that we had never gotten the chance to drive before and always wanted to. It was breathtaking. This is definitely a place that Jeff and I will return to without a truck and explore further. I couldn't live in this part of the country, but what a awesome place to take a few days off and explore. We were 112 miles away from our delivery in Nampa when we got a call requesting that we repower a load from Boise to Denver...yup Denver...hometown. Heck yeah we were going to do that! The load was due the next day by noon (6-6)

We immediately got on the Drivertech and asked if we could take a few days of home-time after dropping off the load and were approved until Saturday, 6-9 @ 14:00. Aaahhh a few days home of rest, relaxation, pool time and visiting family. It was awesome. Our grandbaby has grown so much since being home in March. I got to float in the pool and catch up on my tan and daughter-in-law time, as well as we cooked some yummy dinners and I finally got my new glasses...bifocals :o (

So....it only took 36 hours to find an empty trailer in Denver, what a joke! We headed to Fort Worth and dropped our load, then went immediately to Irving terminal. To make a REALLY long story short we turned our truck in and quit USX. We spent and hour and a half with the terminal manager and he agreed that this company has lost its driver focus. It is pretty sad. I hope things turn around, but I don't see it happening too soon in the near future.

We have spent the last few days in orientation at our new gig...which was conveniently only 12 miles aways from the Irving terminal. We are working for Waggoners Trucking. They put us up in a hotel and we have been in orientation since this past Monday. We will be done tomorrow and head to Denver, most likely, to pick up our truck. This is an opportunity we have been waiting for ever since we started in this industry. We will now be running flatbed on a dedicated run from Denver to OK City and possibly Odessa, TX. It is for a dedicated customer so we will get to know who we are dealing with on a daily basis and have a relationship with our client, something we are much more familiar with. We will have a dedicated trailer again and the strapping and tarping will be done inside a warehouse on each end, so we don't have to fight any elements, which is awesome. We will be running 4 weeks on and one week off. All of our downtime will be spent at home in Denver. The client will call us when the truck is loaded, so we don't even have to wait around in our truck anymore either, the customer is 10 minutes away from the house in Commerce City. But the best part about this job is it isn't about running miles anymore to make our paycheck bigger. We are on salary, and lets just say both of us are almost back to making six figures again, without having to sell our souls or run our asses off. Its the best of both worlds. We are both excited to start our new gig and London is anxious to get back into a truck and get running. He has no idea how much time he is going to get out of the truck, be home and have some fun with his pal Diesel at home. We get to see our kids and grandson more often and get back in touch with what it is like to be home every weekend and once in the middle of the week. It almost sounds too good to be true, but like I said orientation is almost over and everything they have promised us, and more, has come true. It is so nice to work for a company again that doesn't treat us like we are five years old and have no idea what we are doing. Its like we have joined a family again, like Watkins used to be. I think we have finally found nirvana in the trucking industry.

Reality Check

So...last week while in Portland, Jeff and I had a chance to do some thinking...about what we were doing out here and how frustrating our job has been lately. Don't get me wrong we love doing what we do, but trucking is a strange beast. You would think if you had two hard working people in a truck that truly drive as a Team (which we were trained to drive 11 hours a day,standard in this industry) and drive hard 7 days a week, most trucking companies would chomp at the bit for the opportunity to employ us. Instead, this industry has shown us that mediocre, sometimes even lazy, not honest, and downright grumpy people abound in this industry.

Drivers talk a big game about miles they drive, which I know for a fact, that anyone who announces their miles on a weekly basis are just plain liars. People that truly run great miles on a weekly basis don't need to brag about it. They know where their bread and butter comes from and don't feel the need to shout it out to the world, which by the way, there are only 7 days in a week, so any Team telling you that they run 7500 to 8000 miles in a week in a company truck are just liars. Do the math...unless you have a truck that runs 75 mph 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, running those kind of miles legally is not possible. Plus even if you drive out your 70 hours of drive time per person per week and you average 65 mph, which doesn't include, stopping to go to the bathroom, eating or putting fuel in your truck, any type of construction in your path, shift changes, laundry, grocery shopping, loading and unloading, taking a shower or waiting on dispatch to give you your next load, which anyone who drives a truck knows all of these things must happen to make it possible to do your job, can drive a maximum of 9100. But reality is you average your trips at 50 mph. So on average company trucks are governed at 65 mph, but factoring in all of the things above you must do to keep your truck rolling and the people driving it fairly happy, you use the 50 mph rule. So, let's do the math...50 mph x 140 driving hours (70 hours each) is a MAXIMUM of 7000 miles. This also relies on your company dispatching you the 7000 miles in those 7 days, and the moon being aligned with the stars correctly, which in the last 2 1/2 years we have done this job, has never happened. We have run a maximum in a week of 6742 miles in a company truck governed at 65 mph.

All trucking companies are full of fluff. They tell you what you want to hear to get you to sign up with their company, claiming their company is better than all the rest. Reality check, all trucking companies are the same, you just have to choose the level of stuff your handed on a daily basis that you can deal with.

Do I sound bitter? No, just frustrated. I'm tired of lip service and inconsistent miles. I understand that the amount of freight changes on a weekly basis, but give the miles to people that continously perform. Let the sitters sit or the people that just don't want to run that hard on a weekly basis. We are consistent in our miles and communication to our company and Team Adventure expects the same out of any company we work for.

Thanks for letting me vent.  My next post will be in a 'happy place'....