I delivered my load near Chicago yesterday. Despite the hard work involved with untarping and unsecuring it, everything went pretty well. When I called in to dispatch they asked me to stop by one of our regular customers outside of Milwaukee and pick up some stuff to bring back to the yard with me. naturally I agreed.

Once there I wished I hadn't agreed. I had to load up 13 snow plow blades. In order for all of them to fit on the trailer they had to be stacked. Snow plow blades don't exactly stack easily. It took a lot of work on my part in the way of placing lumber and guiding the damn things into place to get them all loaded. A hell of a lot of work considering it wasn't even my load. But I did it anyway as it helped out whatever driver was actually going to be delivering them.

Once I got them loaded and secured I called in to let dispatch know that I was on my way. He mentioned that he night need to "use" me to pick up some stuff in Oshkosh at 9:00 PM. I told him "not only no, but hell no", I was tired as hell and done for the day. He said he'd find someone else. LOL

This morning I put my truck in the shop for routine servicing. While waiting for them to finish with my truck I took another truck and ran up to Oshkosh and picked up a fire truck to bring back to the yard. My load, a different firetruck, was already on the yard but as my truck was in the shop I figured I may as well put the time to good use instead of just sitting around doing nothing.

Once back to the yard I secured my fire truck and headed on out with it. The schedule on my run was tight. I need to get this fire truck (over sized load) to Portal, ND Saturday morning. The truck is going into Canada and I'll be meeting up with a Canadian driver there and transfer it from my trailer to his. Canada won't allow us into their country as our trucks have a much longer wheel base than they allow. They only allow trucks with a wheel base of 240" (I think) and my truck has a wheel base of 300".

Once loaded up I went down to the truck stop to weigh my truck. We had permitted for maximum weight but I still like to weigh everything just to be sure. Turns out it was a good thing that I did. The permits allow for 40,000 lbs per axle set. My trailer axles weighed in a 40,060 lbs. 60 lbs over the limit. Damn!

I went back to the yard and took all of the chains loose and we moved the fire truck forward about three inches which was all the room we had to work with. That shifted at least 100 lbs forward. That would make everything nice and legal. The problem was, with the time lost in doing all of this there was no way I could get as far down the road as I had planned before the sun went down.

I was behind schedule before I even got started.

Tomorrow is going to be a tough day of running flat out as hard as I can. There won't be time for meal breaks, or stopping to stretch my legs. It'll be a day of constant running to try and get as far as I can as fast as I can.

Such is trucking.