The weather was typical fall in western PA.
It was so nice getting to take Starla's pooch, Boots, for a walk on the country road beside our home.
Saturday morning Pops and went to buy his hunting license and ran some errands. When we got home it was nice to see Our son in law's son, Hunter, there. It was good to get to see him. He was getting ready for next weekend. It will be the opening of bow season.
Bill P grilled us all steaks on the grill.
Sunday we were excited to get to our home church, Wills a Mountain Church of Christ. Chad was the teacher of Sunday School this time. The lesson and the sermon were challenging.
Later in the day our son, Tom and fiancé, Sophia came to dinner. I made spaghetti, always a favorite.
We didn't get to see our son, Drew, this time. He was involved in a home run derby that he ended up winning. He keeps himself very busy and active.
We pulled out that evening and headed to Morgantown.
We drove past the WVU campus, made our pickup and then headed to Charlotte, NC.
Next we had a military load from NC. When we do highly secure loads we get as little info as possible. And this time the problem was bad directions. We got through the truck inspection and tried to find our pickup with the directions that the gate guard gave us. Oh, well, that didn't happen. So we got our contact on the phone and found out that we even though we were on base, we were still 13 miles from pickup.
Eventually got there and got our load. Although load is kind of weird. It was one crate, 130 pounds.
That load must have set the tone for the week because "late" turned out to be the theme of the week.
We traveled all night and reached our destination, another military installation in Alabama. We were the sixth truck in line. We had another load following his one and we really needed to unload this one crate and get moving.
Fate had other ideas. As I said, we were the sixth truck, but 2 were picking up and went Elsewhere. We were now 4th truck in line. We waited, we waited, we watched the very first truck, waiting for it to pull out so we would inch closer to the dock. It didn't move. We began to see people, many people, come and go. Finally we were told that the first truck had a freight mishap. One of their freight crates had gotten smashed during transit and because of what the contents were, pictures had to be taken, inspections had e made, protocol had to be followed and we all had to wait some more.
And then fire trucks started to arrive at the other end of the long warehouse. Oh wow!
They weren't there long though, apparently one of the trucks brakes were hanging up and caught fire.
It was all good though. We did get our turn to unload and then drove to Atlanta for our next pickup.
Atlanta traffic as usual was horrible and it was near 3 in the afternoon when we arrived. The shipping man was very grumpy. He had expected us much earlier and his frustration was very plain to us. Oh well.
We got our shipment which was highly secure, so much so that we had another vehicle traveling as an escort with us the whole way into Canada by the next morning.
We haven't done a Canada load in over a year. Canada requires a speed limiter on the truck and ours doesn't have one. Our company offered to pay to have ours set and then reset as part of our acceptance of the load. So even though we were a little rushed, we had to stop before crossing the border and have that done.
We did make it to the shop by 8 am. It only took a few minutes to have the limiter set and off we went, closely followed by our escorts.
We made our delivery and was back at the shop to have speed limiter reset by 12:30. Our escorts had left us when we reached the US border. We were predispatched on another load picking up the next morning but we had to drive to Maine to pick it up.
We were tired but needed to stop to walk for exercise. We hadn't had time yesterday so we wanted to be sure to do it today. We stopped in Chicopee, MA at a Walmart to do that.
After walking we decided to sleep a few hours before moving on. It was about 10 pm. We fell asleep but was awakened 2 hours laters by loud yelling and commotion.
I peeked out the window and just outside in the almost empty parking lot was a huge gang of young men. As I watched I realized they were playing what looked like frisbee football. They were very loud.
A camper that was parked beside us pulled out and left and a short time later we left too.
Pops drove us to a rest area in New Hampshire where we slept a tiny little bit more.
Our pickup in Maine was on the harbor just inside the state line. It took us quite awhile to get the clearance to get on base. The computers needed for background checks were running very slowly. But finally we made our pickup and was backtracking back across Massachusetts and into New York. We arrived at delivery right at the start of rush hour.
Whew, what a week. It is finally Friday. We are beat.
It took us about 40 minutes to reach a truckstop. We didn't get to settle long though. We needed Internet to get caught up with bill paying, paperwork and to register for a class we are taking next week. The Internet there was way to weak there to get anything done and I got very grouchy when I couldn't get things taken care of. So Pops slept a few hours then drove us a couple hours west to another, bigger truckstop with a better internet connection.
Today we cleaned the truck, did our laundry, paid bills, registered for class, booked our hotel,(we can't stay in our truck next week while at class), cleaned out some cabinets and watched many Hallmark movies.
Tomorrow we will be attending Lake Country Christian Church. We have been there twice before. After that we will head to the grocery store to restock our supplies.
We have class on Wednesday, but we are scheduled for some maintainence and repairs on Tuesday, all of that in Ohio.
We are sitting near Rochester, NY now and we are hoping for a Monday load that will get us a little closer to Ohio without having to deadhead (drive empty) so far.
Keep us in prayer, we need it.
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