The final days to take us home

07 September 2014

Goooood morning!

            With nearly 3000 miles behind us, Scout and I arrived home late Thursday evening after our final load was delivered to a local distribution center near Gresham. I can say that I have never missed my own bed so much! Living with someone in that close of quarters for any amount of time can be quite the challenge and Scout was so incredibly nice and kind the whole time, always trying to make things easier. I was only on the truck for 9 days, I can't imagine that being my life. Just being allowed into it for a short amount of time makes me even more thankful to the men and women who choose this career.

            In the early morning, around 3:30 am, we were heading north on I -5 when a police car came rushing by, we estimated he was easily doing over 100 mph. It came as a shock when we finally caught up to him and the reason he had been going so fast, there was an overturned semi on the highway blocking one northbound lane. Talk about a scary site! Seeing that we had just missed seeing that happen first hand gave me pause to think about just how dangerous this job is. Scout was telling me that in order to get the roll over cleaned up that they would need 2 of the large tow trucks, a crane, another truck and empty trailer to get the items from the overturned truck into another truck and hopefully delivered as long as it was totally destroyed. The driver of the truck will likely lose his job, depending on the cause of the accident the driver could possibly lose his license too. It was extremely windy that morning, so much so that a few times I got a bit nervous with how much we were being blown around. This could possibly shut the freeway down for hours. I was so thankful that it wasn't us and that we missed the clean up and being stuck in the traffic that was sure to be backed up for hours on end.

This is the product that was damaged and had to be thrown away. I never

did get a picture of the trailer fully loaded. It was difficult because

after the trailer is loaded they put zip locks on them to assure that

there has been no tampering with the product. Also, I wasn't able to get

on the dock while they were loading.

            We had one load where we picked up a loaded trailer from the yard in Ontario to take to Oxnard. After the trailer was unloaded there were about 15 boxes of the product that were damaged. When this happens Scout puts a call in to Marten and is given instructions on whether to throw away the items, keep them to deliver to another warehouse (depending on how badly damaged they are), or he can keep the items for himself. This load happened to be boxes of egg product, the stuff the restaurants use to make omelets. The warehouse didn't want the damaged items and because it had to be kept refrigerated, we couldn't keep it. I felt awful throwing it away. What a waste! This got me to thinking that there has to be some way to manage damaged goods so that the food items to not go to waste and that they could be picked up and used by food banks/ homeless shelters.

The view of Lake Shasta

Mt. Shasta

            The  trip through Northern California was much prettier as we headed north than the trip down. On our way down the smoke from wild fires was so bad that it was actually burning my eyes and gave me a headache. This time however, there was no smoke and we could actually see Mt. Shasta. What pretty views we had! Oh and seeing Lake Shasta was shocking, the water levels were the lowest I've ever seen.

            Our final night's sleep was at a truck stop in Phoenix (just outside Medford). We had a nice dinner that wasn't at a fast food restaurant and a pretty good night's rest, the first one the whole trip that we didn't need the a/c on all night. In fact when we got up in the morning I had to put my little jacket on and turned on the heater for a bit. Quite the change from those hot Cali nights. It's good being back home and able to catch up, do laundry and actually relax. I know it sounds strange but it's hard work sitting in that truck! I thought I'd get more reading done, or blogging daily would be easier but time just went by so fast. Scout is back on the road today and while I'm going to miss him (as usual) I think I'm much better suited to life at home.

Some cool graffiti on a trailer

Someone has a sense of humor

This is what the sleeper looks like. The black on the sides is the privacy curtain. Only 1 person
can stand at a time, at least it is plenty tall!

The view from the bed. I would sit on the bed and write my blog  or surf the  internet while Scout would sit up front and use the steering wheel as his desk  for his laptop. 

This is the Qualcomm unit that Scout used to communicate with the office, update his log book, get information on his loads, and use the special GPS. The GPS unit in the trucks is used because it gives drivers routes to use that their trucks will fit on. They have to be mindful of bridges and underpasses that will be on their route so that the trucks/ trailers will fit. Normal GPS units will not give that information.

Our final destination

Hope you enjoyed my little blog about my experience on the road. Peace!