I'm currently on I-80 in central PA enjoying a bit of quiet time before hitting the road again. The trip into the NE was interesting and served to remind me once again why I don't like running up there.
The first stop, in VT, required driving through some beautiful country on narrow, winding roads. When I finally rolled into the little town and came upon the place I was to deliver it was painfully obvious that it was simply impossible to turn my rig into that narrow, sharply angled gravel drive. I kept going until I found a spot wide enough to pull over and call the guy.
He directed me to a small auto salvage place that would pull the generators off the trailer and then would bring them to him later on their small rollback trucks. Cool.
One of the generators was on the very back deck of my low boy and so was easy enough for the guy to pull off. He hooked his wench cable to it and dragged it off of my trailer and onto his roll back. The second was more of a challenge as it was on the front deck and would have to come off from the side. I directed him to pull his truck onto the side street and I then backed up until the front deck was across that street. Naturally everyone and his brother suddenly wanted to use that street and was less than happy with us. Oh well.
As the road was far too narrow for me to turn around and go back out the way I came in I had to just keep going the way I was pointing and had to go about 30 miles in the wrong direction to get back to the interstate. That's VT for you.
The two MA stops proved even more interesting. The first was in an office park that was not built with trucks in mind at all. As soon as I pulled into the drive I saw that it would be impossible to get around to where I was to meet the crane without tearing up a lot of very nice landscaping. I called the guy, explained the situation, and he agreed to be responsible for all damages.
Sure enough, I no sooner set the brakes at the delivery point when the site maintenance manager showed up bitching at me about the damage. I just pointed to my contact guy and said "Go talk to him about it." My guy assured him that he and his people would repair the damages.
The last stop in MA required me to pull into a narrow drive off a very busy road. The only way to get back out would be to back into this very busy road. Dangerous at best. I got lucky and a local cop happened along and he agreed to stop traffic for me although he was very grumpy about the whole thing. I've noticed that MA cops all seem grumpy and a little rude all the time.
I beat it out of MA as quickly as possible. The shortest route to where I was to pick up in NJ on Tuesday was to run through CT and NYC. Not a chance. Way too much traffic and long back ups. I decided to run across I-90 to I-87 in NY and then down to I-84. The long way for sure, but actually faster due to avoiding all of the back ups.
Getting to any small town in NJ can be a routing challenge as they have restrictions on almost all state and county routes in the state. One is supposed to stick to US highways for as long as possible and only use the shortest possible state and county routes to your destination. That added an extra 30 minutes to the trip but I got there without getting ticketed.
The one big damper, literally, to all of this was the fact that it was raining the entire time. I got rained on for two days straight. Non-stop. I hate working in the rain. Everything is slippery, muddy, and dangerous. I nearly fell off the trailer yesterday as I was strapping down part of my load. There was mud on my boots and I slipped on the wet trailer decking. I managed to catch myself before going over the side.
Now that all of the work is done the rain has passed and the sun is shining. Figures.