Well that was a long enough visit to the East Coast for me!!!  I made it out to Mass and delivered my first stop and then called my second which was supposed to be for the following day.  I only had 1 pallet of product for my second stop so they were nice enough to unload me a day early.  I called in to get my next load but it didn't pick up till the following morning up in New Hampshire.  My final stop on that last load left me about 50 miles south of Boston so I figured since it was only the middle of the day, I could ease up thru Boston instead of going all the way around and shouldn't have too much issue with traffic.  BOY WAS I WRONG!!!  I spent the better part of the afternoon just trying to reach 10mph!  I'm glad it wasn't rush hour!!!  Eventually I got to the other side and things started moving again.

Once a year, the DOT (Department of Transportation) conducts a 3 day safety sweep across the entire country in an effort to insure truck drivers and equipment are following the rules and are up to safety standards (I was proof reading this before posting and realized I had forgotten to put the word truck before drivers so I corrected that knowing that the DOT would never actually check the drivers of cars were following the rules and their vehicles were up to safety standards!).  Last year I was fortunate to not get pulled into one of these and inspected (I got pulled in but they just waved me through).  My luck did not hold this year.  Thursday was the third and final day of their sweep and I only had one more weigh station to pass.  I was not to be as lucky this year as last year.  I thought I had made it through because the gave me the arrow for the bypass lane so I was on my way out and when I looked in the mirror......blue lights.  I was fortunate in the fact that they didn't do a full inspection on me, they just wanted to see all of my paperwork and UNfortunatly, I was a little behind on my log.  The nice officer only gave me a warning though.

Anyway back on the road and heading to New Hampshire for pickup in the morning.  I have not been to NH since starting with this company so I got to cross that state off the list.  Only 3 more to go!  Got to Bristol, NH in the morning and picked up my load.  Strange load...I picked up there and am going to Indiana and delivering part of what I picked up and they are adding more to my load at that stop and from there I go to Houston to 2 different stops there which at this point I have nothing on my truck for any stops in Houston.  Then after Houston, I go to Laredo, TX and deliver everything to a forwarding company that takes it to Mexico!

Right now I am in Ohio waiting to roll to the Indiana stop in the morning.  A cold front has passed by and the high today is 70.  Nice to have these temps after the blistering heat of the last couple weeks.  I spoke to John about continuing to write in the blog but he whined about having to type on his phone cuz he doesn't have is laptop on the truck right now.  We may have to wait a little longer to enjoy the few tidbits of wisdom that John will have for us so he doesn't wear out his thumbs typing!!

I almost forgot about yesterday being 'strange roadkill day'!  Normally I see an abundance of deer that have fallen victim to 'collision with high speed vehicle syndrome' and my trip across Pennsylvania yesterday was littered with that 'normal' phenomena.  As is the case with most trips across the great state of PA, there was enough venison to feed a small army laying on the roadside.  I was privvy to the rare glimpse of roadkill porcupine twice yesterday and ever so rare viewing of roadkill black bear!!!  (It is always great to see that we are taking such great care of our natural wildlife.  Maybe our government can come up with yet another useless program that they can add more taxes to us for, which will eliminate this senseless slaughter along our nations highways.)  The last part, (in parenthesis) is sarcasm, in case you were wondering!!  I know as well as you do that our government would never impliment a program that would create more of a tax burden on the american citizen.

Happy Trails,
Mike