Drive-By Shooting.

____ The third load of peat-moss to Tyler, Texas, this year already. Another weeks work and another 4500 kilometres; so not to be sniffed at. But it doesn't do me any favours when I'm trying to think of interesting stuff for the blog. Infact the most notable event was seeing the eagles alongside Interstate 29. They seem to be in the Percival area of south-west Iowa every year; there must be a food source from the  ponds as they can often be seen on the ice. Driving by and aiming the camera out of the open side window brought limited results; next time I'll stop on the shoulder.
____ The reload was Longview, Texas, forty miles east on Interstate 20. Tall thin gas bottles for the welding industry of Alberta. Empty bottles but heavy, fifteen pallets took the rig upto the legal American five-axle maximum of 80,000 lbs. Back to the yard in Niverville without any freezing fuel problems this week, although the temperatures have stayed at around minus 20 C. Next trip; another load of peat-moss to Texas.

Flying Eagles of the feathered variety.

One on the ice; one in the air.

The Borderline.

Eagles and Vultures.

____Prologue: Remember “Kelly’s Heroes?” Where the tiger tanks, guarding the gold in the town square, have to be started and ran for twenty minutes every four hours? Having a car during a bitter Canadian cold snap is a bit like that. Minus thirty-something silly and my day-off is littered with trips to the front window; pointing the remote starter at the Mustang and watching for a cloud of smoke from the exhaust pipe. Burning money; but Canada in the Winter-time is a money-hungry place to live. Everyone has massive carbon footprint or, come summertime, they’ll have no footprints at all. The extreme cold is that deadly. How the first pioneers survived their first winter; I shudder to think.

____Day 1: Heavy overnight snowfall delays departure while shovel the white stuff from the drive. This gives the snow-ploughs time to clear the roads; so when I do leave the yard conditions are good. Rolls of fabric destined for Mexico is the 17,000lbs load and leaving Friday morning will give me three days to get to Eagle Pass in Texas. After the border, North Dakota gradually warms as I head south on a bare and dry Interstate 29. A flurry of homeward bound Flying Eagles radio of positive temperatures for my tomorrow. But Cubby Bear’s truckstop at Norfolk, Nebraska, can only offer minus 8 degrees C for a night-time high.

____Day 2: The Petro Stopping Centre, York, is the first fuel stop of the trip and the light load of fabric shows a vast mpg improvement over the usual 46,000lbs of peat-moss. I’m driving into a headwind but that is a small price to pay for the warm weather that it bringing from the south. A break for a shower at Oklahoma City sees the thermometer reading a pleasant +14 C. Then to Thackerville on the Ok/Texas border; home of the World’s second largest casino: the Win Star. Enough parking for 200 trucks in their own section, ten food outlets and ten thousand slot machines. I break my exhausting tour of the vast interior with a beer and steak at the Toby Keith Bar and Grill. While I may not always agree with the country singer’s political views; I have to concede that he has picked a damn good chef for his kitchen.

____Day 3: A damp, misty morning stops me getting some photographs of the Win Star’s unique exterior architecture; which reflects the “International City” theme from the inside. London, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, New York, etc. The sun doesn’t break through until south of Waco and the Interstate 35 is busy all the way until I turn off at mile-marker 111. The last hundred miles is west-bound into the setting sun through the arid scrub land that leads to the Rio Grande.

Popular cabover model in Mexico with set back steer axle.

____Day 4: “Fabric to Eagle Pass” is a job that I’ve done several times before; I have come to accept that they won’t start unloading until 9 o’clock and that it will three hours before I am empty. However, this time no body turns up for work; management fail to arrange for temporary agency staff and I don’t get unloaded. I’m left to wander around the shops of Eagle Pass; to sit looking across the Rio Grande at the Mexican town of Piedras Negras, five times the size of its American neighbour.

Trans-shipping at Eagle Pass, Texas.

____Day 5: Unloading is underway when something catches my eye; something is flapping about on the rocky outcrop that faces the Mexican border. I take my camera and climb up to investigate. It's a sick vulture, too weak to fly but lively enough to swipe at me with it's hooked beak when I get too close. It could have been poisoned from eating a poisoned rat. If it had been an eagle then maybe I would have considered taking it to the local raptor rescue centre; but it's an big ugly bugger and I leave it alone. It's four hundred miles to the reload at Lufkin; so the rest of the day is spent on a cross-country Texas drive.

Vulture on the rocks.

____Day 6: A heavy load of bagged bitumen; going to Alberta but in my custody only to Niverville.The route home is a very familiar one and Cat scale at Van tempts me to once more dine at Soulmans Bar-B-Q. Then its north to Joplin for the night.

Trailer wheels right at the back for loading.

____Day 7: The trip is starting to get long on days and short on miles; but with temperatures at the US/Mexican border of +28 degrees C and -28 degrees C at the US/Canadian border, I'm not complaining. The Jetstream is bringing Arctic weather to South Dakota too; I park for the night at Summit and keep the truck running all night.

Roadside Round-up.

____Day 8: An early start as I head for home and an early finish. The first coffee of hasn't kicked-in and I make an early mistake. Rolling down the long Interstate 29 hill from Summit to Sisseton at 75mph in a temperature of -26.5 degrees C. At that speed the wind-chill is -70 degrees C and the fuel filter promptly gels. The truck still runs but its a hundred spluttering miles to Fargo; where I rescue the situation with some additive and some Yukon diesel. More trouble descends as the DEF supply freezes, derating the engine, just south of the border. But I limb back to the yard to complete a 12 hour/567 kilometre day.

____Overall Distance: 5885 km.

Video Diary of a trip to Tyler, Texas.

Part One.

 

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Deliver Tyler, Texas, reload Tyler, Texas, and back to Niverville, Manitoba.

Left Canada on a snowy Saturday afternoon and got down to Council Bluffs, Iowa, by midnight.
Sunday evening saw me on the customer’s doorstep with a load of peat-moss; after taking the Indian Nation Turnpike through Oklahoma.
Reload was also from Tyler; 11 miles away to be exact and I was northbound again well before noon. I stopped at Soulman’s Bar-B-Q for lunch before pushing on to Lebo, in Kansas, for the third night-out.
Forth night-out was at Fargo; which left just three and a half hours driving for the Wednesday morning.
Overall Distance: 2415 km.

Book Cover: Back and Front

 

 

Ochlocknee, Georgia.

Long drawbar tipper

CCC, ex-Army 4 x 8 Unit.

Niverville, Manitoba, to Ochlocknee, Georgia, and back. 5882 km.

Soulman's Bar-B-Q, Interstate 20, Van, Texas.

Sunrise on a snowy North Dakota.

Finally got some photos of the last two trips to  load onto the blog.

Problems Posting Pictures and Maps.

I don't know whats up with the blog at the moment but I can't get the map for the last trip to load. It was only a trip to Atlanta and a reload from Ochlocknee, down near the Florida border. It was good to get into some warmer weather but I've come back to blizzard conditions here in Manitoba. Off to Texas on Saturday afternoon.

New book out soon.

____The publishers have finally accepted the manuscript for my next book; Canadian Longhaul Trucking. Its the first two years of trips from the blog. So I don't suppose there will be many who are reading this that will go out and buy a copy. The book: Canadian Flatdeck Trucking will no longer be available but as all the content of that book is in the new one; it will not be missed. If you did buy Canadian Flatdeck trucking; hang on to it for its rarity value, it only sold 17 copies. Canadian Longhaul Trucking will be available on Amazon; both in North America and Europe.
____ The book is 345 pages and in a 8.5 inches x 8.5 inches format. Black and white photographs with about a hundred maps of the various trips done for both Big Freight Systems and Flying Eagle Transport. It will cost $21.95 USD; 13.65 British Pounds and 16.75 Euros. Plus postage and packing; but that shouldn't be too bad as it will be printed in Britain and Europe as well as the USA.                               https://www.createspace.com/3785370

Statistics for 2012: Flying Eagle #31

• Total for 2012:            264567 km.          164619 miles.
• Average month:             22047 km.            13718 miles.
• Average trip:                   5671 km.               3529 miles.               47 trips.           
• January                           22396 km.
• February                         23504 km.
• March                             22202 km.
• April                               18374 km.
• May                                22796 km.
• June                                20922 km.
• July                                 24045 km.
• August                            25515 km.
• September                       23665 km.
• October                           23254 km.
• November                       22044 km.
• December                        15850 km.
• The stats are for the truck; it went out to work when I had a week off in April and also did some other trips while I had log-hour resets. I could go through every log sheet and get my exact year distance but can't be arsed. I reckon it's about 8000 km from the total; so it's nice to crack the quarter of a million kilometres for the year.                          

Last Laredo 2012.

Sunset : 21st December 2012. When the World would end but didn't.

 ____Prologue: The poor write-up of the last trip was entirely due to self inflicted stress and an over-active brain thinking-up "Good Ideas." Living in a house with two kitchens for the first time, I thought how easy it would be to cook Christmas Dinner when you have two cookers. So I asked a whole lot of people to come round on the 25th and to my amazement they all accepted the invitation. Now I'm worried if I can cook for double-figures and do it right. The last time I attempted to feed fourteen on Christmas Day, at  an isolated French farmhouse, the propane gas  ran out half way through the morning. A large jam-making copper pot and the wood-burning stove rescued the situation; making the World's biggest camion-stew. A nice little four-day trip to finish the year would be nice; but five drops to Laredo have dropped in my lap. Will concentrating on the trip take my mind off of the forth-coming culinary adventure or will I have a nervous breakdown as it all blows my mind?

 

____Day 1: Eight o'clock on a Sunday morning and the Flying Eagle yard is busier than usual as half-a-dozen drivers try to get their last trips before Christmas off to the best possible start. I leave in convoy with Neal Trickett; who is working the Texas-Alberta-Manitoba triangle with peat-moss on the first leg down to Walnut Springs. Breakfast together at the Big Sioux Restaurant at Grand Forks before the Freightliner Glider-Kit pulls away with it's 3 mph top-speed advantage. The full eleven hour driving allowance gets me down to Percival, Iowa, for the first night.

 

____Day 2: Most of Kansas City is in the State of Missouri; but there is a Kansas City, Kansas, and that is the destination of my first window consignment. At a builders merchant occupying part of the old McCormick-International tractor-making plant. Then it's another day of maximising the driving hours. South to Joplin for fuel; then timing my run through Dallas to avoid the worst of the evening traffic. Parking for the night at the customer's Lancaster premises; a much safer option than the close-by Flying'J and TA Truckstops.

 

____Day 3: Snow was falling as I left Canada and a snow-storm warning is being broadcast for much of the Mid-West; but Texas is sunny. After the drop at Lancaster, Houston is next and by three o'clock in the afternoon the temperature has risen to a very pleasent 30 degrees C. Time to relax in an Interstate 10 Rest Area before an early finish at the San Antonio TA Truckstop.

 

____Day 4: A day on Interstate 35; south to Laredo, north to Austin and I'm empty. The reload is booked for Thursday morning at Nolanville; half an hour north of Austin, so another early finish and another day-time high of 30 degrees C. Only bad thing about the day: one piece short at the Laredo delivery. The one major drawback of having preloaded trailers: you never know what's on there. The shipper says that the missing piece was loaded and I must have delivered it to the wrong place. The Flying Eagle office checks with all the customers and they don't have it. I checked every delivery and feel sure it was never on the trailer. I always like to do a good job and hate situations like that.

 

____Day 5: My information tells me that the shipper loads trucks between 08.00 am and noon; which is not a long day for the loaders. However, on arrival, I'm told that it will take from 08.00 to 12.00 to load my trailer with 1296 bales of rock-wool insulation. The loader suggests I drop the trailer and go for breakfast; after which it warms up to another fine sunny day. Homeward bound; the good weather lasts until the snow at Wichita. I'm concerned that a stretch down south won't ever stand the strain.

 

____Day 6: Icy stretches of Highway 81 slow down the drivers of Nebraska a lot more than they would slow down Canadian traffic. At York, the Petro Truckstop is closed; due to it being jam-packed with trucks escaping from the snow covered highways. I elect to go east on Interstate 80, thinking that it wound get clearance priority, but it's a 15mph crawl in both lanes as cautious drivers with little or no winter driving experience plod along on the snow packed carriageway. At Lincoln, things improve; letting me push on to Fargo and a wash for #31 at the Northstar.

 

____Day 7: Down to minus 17 degrees C and it's "Welcome back to the Freezer." Back across the border and into the yard before noon. Last trip of the year completed as I take all the bedding home to be washed and take a few days off after Christmas.

 

____Overall Distance: 6039 km.