ROUTE: Stone Mountain, GA to Orlando, FL: 563 miles (446 loaded + 117 deadhead)
Back-to-back 14+ hour work days and very heavy loads, that’s brutal on the body. I started my day at 07:30 after the minimum 10 hour required DOT break. I had a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich and a Red Bull, the coffee is not very good at the 49er Truck Stop. It was a six hour drive to the delivery and since I was behind schedule I drove it straight without a break. I arrived at 14:00 and the unload took two hours.
Today’s assignment was to pickup a load just north of Atlanta, where the traffic is horrendous. The shipper was a two hour drive from the consignee, so I knew I was going to be tight on hours since I already had driven six hours. My biggest worry was running out of hours in Atlanta as there’s limited parking and the few truck stops fill up early. It was a live load so I hope it would be quick or slow so I could get another Split done, which I explained in the Chapter 10 Blog.
The loading took 90 minutes so I doodle-daddled in the truck to hit the two-hour Off Duty mark to trigger the Split, otherwise my 14 hour clock would have less than an hour and it would have been very difficult to find parking.
The load weighed 44,500lbs. I figured the truck was going to be close to the maximum allowed by DOT Regulations so I had to scale it to make sure I was compliant. I also needed to fuel and best to scale afterwards. I was under the max 80,000lbs by a whisker but both axles were over the DOT Regulations of a maximum of 34,000lbs each by a small margin. I would risk it as the only way to resolve the problem is to move the Fifth Wheel back which is time consuming and time I had very little of. A buddy was given an $850 fine for having one axle over the weight limit.
I found parking at a small QT Truck Stop about 90 minutes south on I-75 and shut it down just before midnight. My workday totaled 16.5 hours thanks to the Split. I was exhausted. The QT has a 24 hour food service so I had a chicken-cheese melt and watched a movie.
I started the next day, 10/10, at 11:00. It’s hard to limit oneself to the minimum 10 hour break, especially after back-to-back 14+ hour workdays. I was too tired to eat breakfast but had a coffee. The drive to the consignee should have been six hours but it took me 7.5 hours due to traffic and a couple of bathroom breaks. I arrived at the consignee at 19:00.
The problem now was that my next assignment was to pickup a loaded trailer in Tampa, FL, 90 miles away and they closed at 23:00. If the unload was quick I could make it. The unload took a little over two hours and I arrived at the shipper at 23:02 and they were closed. Fortunately, the night guard allowed me to drop my empty trailer in their lot so it would be easier to find parking with just the tractor, otherwise known as bobtailing.
BOOK REVIEW: The Outfit by Richard Stark, (1963) – FICTION (****)
Entertaining and very well written. Vivid descriptions of the scenarios and heists. Characters are well established. Parker is a hard-ass but gotta love him.
