TripXXXVIII

____Day 1: Away from Leduc, Alberta, bright and early; taking Highway 14 through Wainwright to meet up with the Yellowhead Trail at Battleford, Saskatchewan. Aiming to put in two long days and have the lumber delivered in Menomonie, Wisconsin, on the morning of the third. Cutting down to Brandon for the night; cutting the 1400 mile trip neatly in two.
____Day 2: Across the border at Pembina, North Dakota, with warnings of flooded roads to the south. The Red River of the North making it's annual attempt to disrupt everything and everybody within 20 miles of it's banks. Interstate 29 is closed 20 miles north of Fargo, detour 20 miles west, 20 miles south, 20 miles east. This is where the grid system of roads works well; but state troopers are parked in every village along the route to make sure no-one can make up for lost time. But I still reach the Kwik-Trip truckstop at Menomonie within my hours and within  a couple of hundred yards of the customer.


 ____Day 3: Lumber delivered before breakfast; then reload details for some steel going back to Winnipeg from Roseville, near St. Paul. But when I get there, the load has already gone. Given to a driver who just rolled up and asked for a load to Winnipeg. The staff at the shipper said that they knew the guy and that his company regularly did the work; but he had no pick-up reference number and no instructions to do the load. He will probably deliver the load to the right place; so the steel hasn't been stolen. But the work has! I was left sitting around for hours while it was all sorted out. Eventually another load was made up for the same customer; but I was last to load. After polythene wrapping and tarping the steel; I made it back to Thief River Falls, taking Highway 59 north through Detroit Lakes as the Interstate 29 was still flooded.

____Day 4: The customer for my steel said they could not accomodate, straight away, the stuff I had loaded so the trailer went back to Steinbach. The truck was booked in for a service; I went home hoping that a short haul truck would do the drop; hoping the tarp job would keep the steel dry and hoping I would get all my equipment back that I had left on the trailer.
____Overall Distance:- 3092 km.