8 am. Heading to receiver. Gotta love Atlanta traffic in the am. We are picking up our load that will take us to Florida to see my babies!! Maddi’s birthday is tomorrow.
DG: Well, once again, I am the victim of what I have termed “punished efficiency “. My trip information said I was to be here by 10:00 am. So I’m here at 9:30, go into receiver office and greeted by a very cordial shipping clerk who most politely informs me that he has repeatedly informed KLLM customer service that this facility does not load prior to 1:00 pm daily, that my load is just now being assembled, but that he will get me loaded ASAP. To which I reply with sincere gratitude. Next I proceed to the truck, look for the door I was given. No numbers. How can I find my door without a number? There is another KLLM driver being unloaded so I ask him which door he is in. “Seven”, he says. Good. Then if I am to pull into door 10 then it would be three from him, but which way? There are a couple of, what I perceive as maintenance workers sitting on a wall at the end of the lot not far from me and observing my confused look inquire if there is assistance they may provide. I say, “Yes, I’m looking for door 10”. “It should be that way, he says pointing in the direction behind me. “Thanks” I say “where are the numbers? I don’t see them”. “We took them down while we are painting”. Good, I thought I was losing cognitive abilities. So we count three from the other KLLM driver and I find door “10”, attempt a blind side back since there are three open spots. No good. I get too far to the left. Could have wrangled it around but no need to show off. Turn around and come at it on the driver’s side.
Good, it doesn’t take long for them to give me a red light, which means we are in your trailer or are going to be any minute so don’t move, and shortly after that we feel them shaking the box. At this rate, 11:00 am presently, we may be out of here prior to our scheduled appointment, which I think was KLLM’s plan all along.
Annie – no such luck. 1:45 pm and we are finally on the road. We figure this is when we would have left if we had gotten here at 1 pm per their request. So, dispatch is now worried we won’t make it to the receiver at 6 am because the clock has already wasted 4 hours out of the driving day and he still has to take a 10 hour break in there somewhere. Their solution? Well since you already have been stopped this long just go ahead and take your 10 hour break and then drive on in. Greg told them flat out NO! If he does this and runs out his clock getting there then we have to wait for him to take another 10 hour break before we can get on the road to see the kids and Maddi’s birthday. They screw up the times but we are to adjust our schedule to make it work? Not this time. So now Greg has to basically fly to Lakeland Florida in order to get there in time for a break or hopefully find a place really close where we can stop for the night and not have to start the clock to unload. Whoever said driving a truck would be fun is a nut!
DG: Nut here. It is fun, most of the time. Now I am sitting by the side of the road waiting for the clock to tick 30. Then drive 20 minutes and stop again, this time for eight hours.
We saw a beautiful magnolia tree at a rest area in Florida.
Annie – We saw this trailer several times tonight. The back doors kept changing from one figure to three and sometimes the one in the middle had a blue line around it. Spooky.
Annie – 11:50 pm. I’m exhausted. The stress of the last couple of hours has worn me out. We were running close on time all day. We knew it was going to be close but felt confident we could make it. Then traffic, red lights, construction, etc. slowed us down and time was even shorter. According to the clock if Greg took a 30 minute break he would have almost two hours left on his drive clock and we only have about an hour to go so all seems good. So we stop and wait. 30 minutes are up, clock shows 1:56 so we take off. Then about 5 minutes in to the trip we see the clock only says one hour. What??? That’s not right. So Greg calls logs and they said KLLM has changed the clocks that if you release the breaks (which we did after we stopped and let Precious out a minute) then the clock goes back to when you first stopped or something like that so the clock only showed a 15 minute break and it took the hour back off. Panic starting to set in a bit because we were told this load cannot be late. At this point we have 30 miles to go and no time left on clock so Greg pulls over and calls KLLM for suggestions. They told him to sit there for 30 minutes and then do mandate to leave to get to truck stop 16 miles down the road. Ok. Then we get an email that says for us to go on to receiver and the guard will show us where to park for the night so the load won’t be late. Hallelujah! So it is now almost midnight and we are sitting in the grass outside the gate waiting for 5:30 so we can go in. We had a dinner of cold Popeyes chicken and watching The Story of God with Morgan Freeman and then turning in. Greg will get up a bit after 5 and drive through the gate and then should be able to go back to sleep while they unload us. I will probably sleep through that. Haha. Then we can be on our way to see the babies. The girls FaceTimed today to see if we were going to make it for Maddi’s birthday. So sweet. Hopefully we will be home by the time they get home from school.
I’m turning in. Goodnight y’all.
DG: That about says it all. Hope your day was better. Love to all. Good night and God bless.
Hills Over The Road 