On our way home

As I was getting the computer out, Josh said to me, “What are you doing? Lizzy is sleeping so well right now.” It seems that anytime I get on the computer to check email, pay bills, or write on the blog, Lizzy decides to wake up and scream. Here’s hoping she won’t this time…

Trucks have to go through scales every time they enter or exit a state and sometimes in the middle of the state. This is time consuming because of having to stop and then get back to freeway speed. Obviously, no one likes to do it, so they have a little device that sticks to the front window of the truck that can communicate with the scale house to let the people know who you are before you get there. Then the scale house sends a signal back to the PrePass (the device) that gives you either a green light to let you know it is okay to bypass the scale, or a red light that tells you to come in and get weighed. This makes it very nice because you can save a lot of time and fuel. Unfortunately for us, for the past few days, we have got red lights at every scale house. Apparently, the computer shows we have to come in every time for a “safety” reason. This is usually a fleet wide reason, but no one else in our fleet has been getting it, so our boss is looking into it. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

The good news is that we are finally on our way home. It took some doing, too! After we got to St Louis we got a preplan that wanted us to go to Houston, TX. We called our boss, and he called the dispatcher, and after a while he called back and said we could get a load going to Oregon, and they could push the delivery back a couple of days so we could spend two days at home. We told them there was no way that would work for us since we needed to make a couple of repairs and improvements to the truck, and move all the stuff from our house to a storage unit. That can’t be done in two days. So they tried to find something different, and finally decided to have us pick up a load going to San Antonio, TX, and take it to Mississippi to meet up with another driver who had a load going to Salt Lake City. So we picked up our load and took it to Winona, MS and swapped loads. Right now we just crossed the border from Iowa into Nebraska (Iowa being our 33rd state). We should be able to get about halfway across Nebraska today and then to SLC by tomorrow night. We are very excited to get home and get everything done!