Disastrous Trip Out of California

I typed this entry a few days ago, but it got sucked down some internet rabbit hole.... and I haven't felt like retyping it until now.

My trip out of California was a complete disaster. It was just one of those trips where everything seems to go wrong (short of a wreck or having another "safety incident).

I did a reset while I was having my windshield replaced, so I wasn't available for a new load until Friday night. Dispatch sent me a load that was a pre-loaded trailer and all I had to do was drop and hook anytime between 10pm Friday and 10am Saturday. It was about twenty minutes from the terminal and I got there a little before 11pm. Dispatch had said they'd advise me of the pick-up number, but never did. And no one answers the phone on Friday night. I told the desk clerk at the shipper which company I drove for and where I the load was going, hoping that would be enough information. She said that no loads for my company would be ready until 6am. There wasn't anywhere legal to park a 70' vehicle in the industrial park, so I asked if I could go ahead and give them my empty, which they took. I wasn't happy about having to wait seven hours for my load, but there wasn't anything I could do. I squeezed bobtail into the only bit of legal parking space left and tried to get some sleep.

At 6am, I went back to the office and there was a new person at the desk. He didn't seem to have any idea what the process was (and I'd never been to this shipper before). Other drivers from my company had told me that the drop/hook process would happen in the middle of the street and I had to be quick about hooking up and getting out of there so that I didn't get a ticket. Apparently, the yard is too small for sleeper cab trucks to maneuver in, so they have you drop your trailer by the curb (on the No Parking EVER side of the street) and you unhook (but don't pull out from under yet) and wait for the yard guy to bring out your loaded trailer. As soon as he drops the loaded trailer in the "center turn only" lane (I'm not kidding), you pull out from under your empty and then hook as soon as possible. Whole thing seems kind of sketch to me. I was nervous doing it at 6am on a Saturday and couldn't imagine trying to do it on a weekday when there would be lots of traffic on that road.

Anyway, the desk guy handed me the envelope of paperwork and told me to find the trailer. I explained to him that he was supposed to call the yard guy and that the guy would bring the trailer out to me. I explained the dropping/hooking in the street and he thought I was kidding.

The trailer number was a letter and three digits. The trailer didn't have my company's logo on it, but since it didn't have any company's logo on it, I figured it was a rental trailer. I did the fastest trailer pre-trip in the history of Ever, sent my #3 QualComm message, and then got back on the road. I got as far as Las Vegas before I ran out of hours for the day.

I got a QualComm message from the weekend dispatcher asking if I had X number trailer. I said no, I have the number trailer that I said in the QualComm message. She said that wasn't the right trailer number according to her computer screen. We QualCommed back and forth a bit (I would have just called her, but it was a dead zone for my phone) and agreed that neither of us had any idea what was going on. She said that I should keep heading east (the load was going to West Virginia) and call on Monday to talk to the person who had originally dispatched the load. A little while later, she sent me another message telling me I had to drive all the way back to the shipper (in west L.A.) and switch trailers because they'd given me the wrong load and paperwork. It took an entire day of driving to get from Vegas back to the shipper, switch loads and get back to the same truck stop I'd started the day at. Very frustrating. I have no idea why the original dispatcher hadn't told me the specific trailer number since they clearly knew which trailer I was supposed to be getting.

Started driving very early in the morning and it started raining a few hours later, just before dawn. And my wipers stopped working. More specifically, the driver's side wiper stopped working and the passenger side wiper was fine. I pulled into a truck stop and parked at the fuel island so that I could have some light. I repositioned the wiper on the windshield and tightened the nut, hoping that would fix the problem and it did. An old car of mine used to have that problem. Glad it was an easy fix.

Made it to Colorado that night. There had been all sorts of signs on the way up the mountain that "All CMVs" were required to chain up at a certain mile marker (just west of Vail). I kept trying to pull off at rest areas only to find that most of the rest areas in that stretch of interstate didn't allow vehicles over 35' in length, but didn't tell you that until after you were on the exit ramp. And the exit ramps were all roundabouts. That's a fun surprise, especially when cars don't seem to understand that they can't pull in next to you in a roundabout.

About forty miles west of that chain-up mile marker, DOT officers were forcing all CMVs to exit and park in this giant emergency truck parking lot. No explanation. After we'd been sitting there for an hour (there were DOT guys on the ramps, but no one in the parking area to ask what was going on), my 14-hour window closed and I was going to be stuck there for the night. I climbed into my bunk, figuring that if someone wanted to talk to me, they'd bang on my window. I got up a few times to see if anything was happening. There was one car with flashing lights going up and down the row of trucks and seemingly picking a truck out at random, talking to the driver and then that driver would leave. The whole process was taking forever. I assumed that they were probably checking to see if everyone was carrying chains, but I never found out. No one ever banged on my window and when I got up the next morning, there were three other trucks parked for the night and no sign of any DOT people.

One nice thing about when I took my break was that the chain-up requirement had changed from "All CMVs" to "All Single-Axle CMVs" so I didn't have to chain up. I stopped at the Love's in Bennette (east of Denver) to get fuel and groceries. There's a supermarket right next to the truck stop and it was nice to get real food, especially fruit. The fruit in most truck stops (if it's there at all) is awful.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. I had one stop in Kentucky and then the final stop in West Virginia. I made the stop in Kentucky on Thursday morning and then got to the final stop that night. I had called and talked to them. My appointment was at 6am, but they told me I was welcome to park there overnight and the guard would take the paperwork and tell me which bay to pull into. It was a really nice, quiet place to spend the night.

I got a load out the next morning from the same town. It was a brokered load (shredded paper bales) and it was going to North Carolina. The paperwork said the cargo weighed 42,000. When I scaled it, my Gross Vehicle Weight was 79,740... which seems weird. I've hauled 44,000 before without being over the legal limit of 80,000.

[GVW is 80,000 pounds and if your vehicle weighs more than that, you have to have a special permit.  You can get a ticket if you cross a roadside Department of Transportation scale and you are either over the GVW or any of your axle sets are over.  For a semi-truck, that means that you can have 34,000 on your tandems (trailer axles) and 34,000 on your drive axles (rear of the truck itself), which leaves 12,000 for your steering axle (very front of vehicle).  You can have a little more on your steering axle (depending on the tires and the rating of the axle, something like 13,000 or 13,500... as long as it doesn't put your GVW over 80,000]

 I was overweight on my drive axles and my tandems. I slid the tandems and balanced out the weight as best I could, but both were still over 34k. I made sure there was more weight on the drives than tandems and I slid the fifth wheel forward. I only move my fifth wheel if I have to because sometimes it's hard to get the pins to lock back out. They wouldn't lock. I had another driver help me for an hour (letting me know when the pins were lined up) and we couldn't get them to go. I called the shop in Missoula and they had me call a mobile service (the truck stop didn't have a shop) and they came out. It took the guy about twenty minutes, but he finally go the pins to lock back out. He said the problem was that the pins on one side would be lined up, but the other side would be misaligned, so the pins wouldn't lock out. Glad he got them to go.

I scaled again and was still heavy on the drives. I called the shop again and asked what to do. He asked me where my chains were and I laughed at myself because I remembered then that one of the trainers in orientation had told us that moving the chains was good if you needed to reposition a few hundred pounds of ballast. I put some garbage bags down in my passenger-side floorboard and then piled the chains in there. I finally got it legal (six scales in all) and told the clerk that my chains were excited because they'd never gotten to ride up front before. There was a DOT scale about 2 miles away, which is why I wanted to make sure it was legal before I left because I wouldn't have time to burn off any fuel.

I was almost out of hours for the week, so I'd asked dispatch for a load I could reset under over the weekend. This trip was only about 500 miles, so I had plenty of time to reset and get there on Monday morning (today). It took four hours to get unloaded at the shipper. The road in and out of the yard (between the shipping yard itself and the staging area where the scale was) was ridiculously steep. I barely made it up the incline when I was empty and couldn't imagine how the trucks that were being loaded there did it. When I'd arrived that morning, there was a tanker truck stuck on the curvy incline at the back gate and they were waiting for a wrecker to come tow him up the hill.

After I was done, I sent my empty and available message to the dispatcher and drove about three miles to a truck stop to have lunch and wait. I waited a few hours and then was told to drive to the North Carolina terminal. I got to the terminal, dropped my empty and then went to get some fuel (I was really low because I hadn't fueled on this trip because the Gross Vehicle Weight was so close to the limit), which I had just enough time to do before my 14-hour window closed.

So, I'm in still in North Carolina and hopefully I'll get a load out of here sometime tomorrow.