Over Gross... weight that is.

Wow, it's been 8 days since I last posted? Geesh. I guess time flies whether or not you're having fun, huh?

I've been working my wheels off. I haven't bothered to refresh my memory by reading my last post, so I can't give you the run down of where I've been. At least not play by play.

I did spend a few days in the south where spring lasted for a few hours one morning and summer took over like a mother hen... a bitch of a mother hen. I swear the day I spent in Florida was the hottest day of the year. According to one bank sign it was 95 degrees. And it sure felt like it. Actually I joked with friends and my hubby that it was one million and five degrees.

When I made the joke to my hubby, he plugged that into some sort of conversion app on his smart phone and informed me that one million, five degrees was around 33 Kelvin. He's a nerd. But that's why I love him.

After getting out of the south I found myself in the wonderful state of New Jersey.

I forgot how much I hate driving a truck in NJ. How the directions you've been given are NEVER right, how places never have what they say they have and how much you have to spend just to park in a safe (haha yeah right) truck stop for the night.

So I had a load going to Edgewater Park or something along those lines. The facility was amazingly difficult to get to because of the way the highway it's on is set up. I was going north bound and the facility was on the left side of the road. But being assholes like the idiots in NJ are, they put up a JERSEY barrier wall between north and south bound lanes of the same frickin' highway.

So in order to get to where I needed to go, I had to take this stupid "u-turn" lane on the right, swing around to a traffic light and then turn left onto the south bound lanes. Well, it was rush hour and the jerks in the 4-wheelers weren't about to be nice to the "jerk" in the 18-wheeler get in their way so I ended up sitting thru 4 frickin' lights before I was finally able to get out of the little turn around thingy.

So I finally arrived at my delivery destination, made my drop and was disappointed to find that they didn't have the empty trailer they claimed to have had. So I sent a message thru the Qualcomm and waited for the box planners to send me another message about where to go to look for an empty trailer next. Next stop was across the river into Pennsylvania. So off I go.

I arrived at the place I was supposed to get the trailer from to find it locked up like a chastity belt. *sigh* So again I sent in a message, received a new one and was sent into Philly to try another place.

Well if I thought the route I was on in Jersey with the retarded concrete barriers and u-turn turnouts was ridiculous, Philly had a few surprises up its' sleeves.

I am following my GPS to the location I was sent to to pick up the empty trailer. Only, I found myself faced with, get this... a 6 lane highway INSIDE another 6 lane highway. It was like three lanes in either direction separated by a grassy median. Then on the outside of each of the three lane sections was another, wider grassy median and then three MORE lanes. So essentially it was 6 lanes in both directions, just separated with the medians.

If you were on the outside highway and needed to turn left you were forced to keep going straight and find a "cross-over" (of which there were very few from outside to inside but plenty inside to outside). As I got closer to my necessary left turn I tried to get myself over into the inner most outside highway lane so I could do one of the rare outside to inside cross-overs. Of course, then I saw the sign that said "all turns from right lane to such and such street" which of course the street I needed. So I ended up having to weave my way back over to the outside right lane (in rush hour mind you) only to get over just in time to MISS the damn turn about.

F*ck.

So I ended up having to go three more blocks out of the way before I was able to get turned around onto the lanes going the other direction. I managed to arrive at the facility to pick up my empty about 15 minutes later than expected. I was ever thankful that they were open and had the trailer I was sent to pick up. Once I was hooked up to it I got back onto the convoluted multi-dimensional highway retardedness and was headed for my next work assignment pick-up.

Of course, now mind you also that my work clock is ticking away mercilessly during all of this nonsense. By the time I arrived at my pick-up location BACK in NJ I had exactly 45 minutes before I would be in violation of the DOT hours of service rules.

Luckily everything was in order at the shipper and I dropped my empty, picked up my load and was parked at the truck stop up the road with 3 minutes to spare. *shew* I hate running things that close.

Now, more fun times to be had before dinner.

When I arrived at the truck stop I stopped on the scales to weigh my load before parking. Once I was parked I did a few things on the electronic log book, filled out some mandatory messages and sent them in, and played eenie-meenie-miney-moe to decide whether to eat dinner in the truck or in the truck stop.

Since the truck stop had a pay-to-park requirement which could be settled by showing receipts adding up to at least $20 on the premises, I decided to dine in the truck stop restaurant. Once that decision was made I headed over to the diesel shop to pick up my scale ticket.

At the counter I told the cashier what I wanted, and gave her my truck number.

"You're co-driver already picked that up."

Hmmm.... "I don't have a co-driver." I replied.

"Oh, well someone came in and paid for it, proceeded to get seriously pissed off and left. I just assumed since it was a woman and the person on the other end of the speaker during the weigh-in was a woman, it was the same person."

"Nope, but might I ask why she was pissed off?"

At this point she showed me the truck stop copy of the scale ticket which was clearly marked with MY truck and trailer numbers and was clearly OVER GROSS weight. By law we're only allowed to weigh in at 80,000 lbs. The ticket indicated that my rig weighed 80,640 lbs.

Oops.

She couldn't reprint the ticket and I was not gonna risk my parking spot just to redo it that night. I waited around for a bit in hopes that the idiot who paid for and got pissed about MY ticket would return it and demand a refund after realizing it wasn't hers. But after about 20 minutes she never showed so I just figured it was a loss.

I wasn't worried TOO much about being overweight because I had full tanks of fuel and would burn enough of it off during my trip to the receiver to drop the excessive weight. Plus it was going to be a Sunday when I made my trip and nine times out of ten the scales on the route I was taking were closed on Sunday's. I was sweating it a couple of times coming up on scale houses while en route today but was able to sigh in relief each time I found them closed.

So anyway, back to Jersey. After waiting for the non-returning scale ticket holder I decided to head inside and have dinner at the truck stop. It was tasty and enjoyable. And after a rather uneventful evening, I went back to the truck and tucked into bed.

Today was a fun trip to Ohio with this heavy ass load. The first hour and forty-five minutes were spent driving through small town PA trying to get to the north/south turnpike I-476. I love driving through small town PA actually, even with some of the tight turns and close quarters in the "downtown" areas. I think I was actually in the "downtown" region of Quakertown today and found that it was quite charming.

Once on the turnpike and then on I-80, life was pretty boring. I found myself listening to one of the comedy channels on my XM radio and even that wasn't keeping my mind from drifting away occasionally. I had to stop twice to get out and move around just to wake my brain and body back up. I-80 is REALLY BORING!

I arrived at the place I'd planned to take my break for the night much earlier than expected and have since been just hanging out. I took a much needed shower, grabbed some Subway and then fired up the laptop to watch some X-Files via Netflix. And now here I sit, blogging.

I hope I've entertained you. If not, get over it. I'm not a trained monkey working for tips. I'm a trucker, working to pay bills and have a little adventure while I'm at it.

Oh and don't forget... Twittah... @truckerroxx :)