Tonight finds me in a hotel in Beloit, WI. I spent the day at the Oshkosh defense plant picking up an armored truck heading for Camp Lejuene, NC.

I got there early this morning but the paperwork was hung up and they weren't ready to load the truck. I spent most of the day at the nearby truck stop smoking my pipes and waiting for the call to go pick it up.

I finally got the thing loaded around 4:00 this afternoon. Sometimes it just goes like that. I went back to the truck stop to scale my truck to see just how heavy I was. I knew it would be an over weight load due to all the armor. Sure enough, I scaled out at just shy of 110,000 lbs.

Being that late in the day I knew there was no chance of getting the over weight permits today. If I am lucky they will have the IL permit when I check in tomorrow morning. I won't get the permits for the other states until Monday which is when I had originally planned to be in NC. Oh well.

I came down here to the state line, amidst a pretty nasty thunderstorm, and checked in for the night. I would have just slept in my truck but the truck stop parking lot was full and the hotel was the only place I could park without crossing the state line.

I considered just trying to sneak around the weigh stations and heading on down to NC, but getting caught would mean a fine in the tens of thousands of dollars and I just can't afford that right now. Not worth it.

It looks like I'll have plenty of pipe relaxation time this weekend.