24 degrees this morning but thankfully no snow! Still sitting. Waiting on call when we can deliver our load. 11 am appointment but would like to get out sooner if we can. Greg is having a severe reaction to the cold and snow and it ain’t pretty! Lol. Precious doesn’t like it either. They could leave me here if they wanted. It is beautiful up here. I really hope we get sent back this way in the spring or summer. I would love to see what all these trees look like with leaves on them.

Time to head to drop off the load. Unfortunately the gas tank is blinking so got to stop for gas first. No biggee. We have an hour. Well, pull in to Pilot and there’s a line of course but when it was our turn the pump wouldn’t come on. Waited and waited. Still nothing. Pilot guy comes out and says the computer on the pump is frozen so he is going to try to reset it. Nothing. Didn’t help at all. So he shut the pump down. Lovely. We can’t back up and go to another lane because there are trucks lined up behind us, who also can’t move, so Greg ends up going in to the store and buying a 5 gallon gas can and getting gas out of the pump next to us. This at least lets us Get enough gas to get to our stop. And what a stop it was. You hate to see the directions take you in to a neighborhood. Never a good sign. Apparently the distribution center was first and the houses and other businesses were all built around it. We ended up going past it at first because it is down an alley. The guy came out to help direct. Greg backs up and turns down alley then has to pull in to the lot next door and turn around because he is faced wrong. Several stops and starts later we are turned right. Now comes the fun part of getting in to the dock. To start with we were down an alley. Second problem was all the workers park in the alley. To get in to the dock it was up a foot and back a foot, angle this way and back and do it all over again. Took forever to inch it in there and the whole time he is doing that there are cars coming down the alley and trying to go around him. Finally he gets in the spot without hitting anything (big round of applause) with scant inches to spare. See the pictures below. Wow! I need a Valium!

Then! We get all the way back in there, Greg opens the doors to the trailer and the boss guy comes up and says shut the doors and pull up. It’s break time. AARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!

Finally, they get us unloaded and now there are three trucks in the alley waiting their turn to do what we just did that we now have to get passed them to get back out of the alley. What a tight squeeze. Glad that is over!! Greg’s nerves are definitely better than mine when driving.

While sitting here we see a whole bunch of people lining up behind cars that have pulled in to the alley. One car has Mexican food, one Peruvian and one soul food. Do we risk it? Sure, why not. New experiences and all that. Just hope one of my new experiences isn’t throwing up on the side of the road. I really want the Mexican but figure not having easy access to a bathroom, just in case, might not be a good idea. After crossing the language barriers in both vehicles (we were the only ones who spoke English) I had the Peruvian chicken with a hot sauce that brought tears to my eyes (Love it) with rice, fried plantains and for some reason I can’t figure, a fried egg on top. Threw the egg off (yuck!) and ate the rest. It was really delicious and glad I went for it. Greg, with the iron stomach, had the Mexican food. It was a sandwich with ham, cheese, guacamole, lettuce and a mole sauce. He said it was great too!

Now back to pilot to fill up this time. Then we need to find a truck wash out and go to North East Pennsylvania for next load. We are going through southern New York to get there instead of back through New Jersey and Pennsylvania which will be nice. Better than going back the same way we came. It’s just north of Erie, Pennsylvania and just south of Buffalo, New York. Sounds really cold! Forecast is high of 21 today. Then taking that load to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

As we crossed in to New York there was a sign for West Point Military Academy.   We weren’t too far away.   We have been there before and it is quite an impressive site.

We drove through the Catskills on our way.   These are some of the pictures I was able to take before it got darks.   Lots of little streams and creeks and a few rivers.   Signs all say this is a great fly fishing area and I can believe it.    We passed the Upper Delaware River but it was too dark to take a picture of it.   Lots of old colonial and early American names of hotels and restaurants through here.   Also must be a lot of dairy through here somewhere but I didn’t see any cows.   Lots of signs for ice cream and “this is the real reason you come to the Catskills”.    Must be a big Jewish population up here as well as a lot of signs were in both English and Hebrew.   Several signs for get your Kosher meal here.

Greg here.  Going to embellish and clarify certain things.  Our 11 am appointment was going to be easily made as we arrived within 20 miles of the stop 19 hours beforehand.  I called their receiving department and told them I was in the neighborhood and asked if we could get unloaded any earlier than 11 am in the morning.  The person on the other end was encouraging and said that he would try to get us in at five o’clock.  That would be great.  However, after hanging up the question came to mind, did he mean five in the pm or five in the am.  Wasn’t sure.  Either way we would be ready.  Then I got to thinking about my clocks.  You’ve heard Annie talk about them but not sure all of you understand what that means.  Not sure I do, but I will offer an explanation according to the way I understand it.  I have learned that if you start your clocks you better be ready to move because the “clock” is ticking.

To explain the clocks, you must first understand that these “clock” regulations were developed by some bureaucrats in Washington, none of whom had ever driven a truck for a living and most likely never worked at anything other than making other people’s lives miserable.  And as you will see, they don’t make any sense in the real world and like everything else our government does, they believe us all to be the same and therefore what’s good for one is good for all or what’s bad for one is also bad for all.  Did I make my feelings clear here or did I beat around the bush a little?  Anyway, some knucklehead came up with three clocks.  An 11 hour clock, a 14 hour clock and a 70 hour clock.  The 11 hour clock counts the hours you actually drive the truck in any 24 hour period.  You can stop this clock whenever you stop the truck for bathroom breaks, eating breaks, or rest breaks.  It starts again whenever the truck reaches 20 miles per hour or I can start it myself by pushing a button, but I never do that as those few minutes you save going around a parking lot in a truck stop looking for an empty slot or pulling out can be used for driving.  The 14 hour clock which contains the 11 driving hours plus 3 working hours for fueling, doing macros (more on these later), filling out and sending in trip sheets so you can get paid and the company can bill its customers, reading and responding to the email messages sent to you by your dispatcher or driver manager, going into the guard shack at each stop to check in and get your bill of lading when picking up or getting them to sign the bill of lading when dropping off, taking breaks and anything else you do once that clock starts, even waiting for loading and unloading counts against your 14 hour “work day” clock.  This clock, once started with the pre trip inspection whether morning or evening, cannot be stopped and once it runs out you have to stop for 10 hours in order to reset it.  So, if you haven’t figured it out, if you spend four hours at a loading dock, that’s an hour out of your driving time.  It’s like someone coming into your place of work, making you sit for an hour, and even though you are on the job, you won’t be getting paid for that hour and you can never make it up.  Now the 70 hour clock works similar to the 11 hour clock, that is to say, you can stop this one as well.  Every time you go off duty, it stops.  However, it accumulates the time you drive and are on duty so that you cannot do either once you reach 70 hours in 8 days.  To reset everything back to 0 requires a 34 hour time out, off duty, sleeping and/or a combination of the two as long as it is consecutive.  I wonder what kind of studies the government did to come up with these times.  So suffice it to say, one has to watch their time.  Oh, and I have to take a 30 minute break sometime in my first 8 hours of the work day.  Then I can have some more driving/work time.

About the parking, this was the tightest spot I have been in so far and I don’t wish to get in a tighter spot.  It was like wielding a 53′ scalpel with a robotic wheel while performing brain surgery on a giant.  One wrong move and we both suffer.  Well, maybe not exactly like that, but there was not much room for error.  And you know what happens when a vehicle hits another vehicle or some other immovable object.  That’s right, your insurance rates go up.  And we don’t want that.

One final word and I will stop.  I don’t think a day goes by that I am not amazed or surprised by something.  When we saw those cars pull into the alley and start selling food to all the workers in the area we just had to try it.  I went to see what was for lunch.  As Annie told you there was a van selling Peruvian food, an SUV selling Mexican food out of the back and sedan with it’s trunk open selling fried chicken and ribs.  The Peruvians and Mexicans spoke very little English, but we were able to communicate chicken and beef, spicy and mild.  So Annie had the Peruvian chicken and I had the Mexican.  Both delicious and homemade.  A nice surprise to a day that had not started so well.  Anyway, please check out the pics below.  See you tomorrow.  Greg

These pictures do not do the mountains justice at all.   It was absolutely breathtaking and much steeper than they look in the pictures.  Up and down, up and down.  Almost like a roller coaster.