St. Louis = Lost

Early this morning we headed out to our stop of Granite City finally. We made it there on time but of course we had to wait for them to unload and that took about 3 hours. Josh said that he is running out of hours so for the rest of time until we get our days off we are going to be doing short runs so that means nothing exciting to see that I haven't already seen. Its a bummer but happy we started out with a bang. It is also ironic that the stop in Granite City was a Prairie Farms, Josh just left Peavler trucking and all they did was deliver to Prairie Farms, it seemed all too familiar except he had never been to this place before and it was quite interesting to find as it was tucked away in this swarming mess of steel manufactures and train railways, very industial part of town.

We then get our next load assignment, going to Anheiser Busch in St. Louis. I DO NOT like driving in St. Louis at all, I have had some harrowing times there and I hate the traffic and all of the on ramps, off ramps, and crazy drivers. We used to go there quite often for Alex when he had doctor appointments at the Childrens Hospital. I knew one way on how to get there and if for any reason I got off track I was lost. This was of course before the days of GPS and the like but I have to say that our GPS today was no friend. We passed the St. Louis Arch and while we are on area of road that seems to be way up in the sky with no off ramps it says "turn left here" ..um.. no thanks I don't have a death wish. Obviously the GPS was no help in finding our way and once we got so far there really wasn't a good place to try and turn around, trucks aren't allowed on quite a few of the streets and so began the furious map reading and planning on how to get where we need to go. We ended up going almost all the way around St. Louis before we got back on track. I have proved my worth of map reading and direction giving, what would he do without me! Even with my handy dandy directions we were still a little lost towards the end on where we were supposed to enter and eventually with dumb luck we find it and had to wait forever to get inside. We find out that we are on a drop and hook load which Josh prefers but the truck has been acting a little funny lately. First off the truck will only idle for so long before it turns itself off and as we are waiting in line to get into the brewery it turns off, and didn't want to start again! ARRRGGGG!!! What is going on? Eventually after many many tries it finally starts up and off we go, or at least we think. Josh finds where we are supposed to park the empty trailer and the pin won't release, he is getting hot from the sun and hot under the collar but eventually too that finally gives. We pick up our load and thankful they have scales on site so we don't have to weigh it at a station and have to pay $10 to make sure we are evenly distributed. Now we are trying to find a approved gas station to get gas and try to get the heck out of dodge. Thanks to me the wondergirl trucker sidekick I found us a place and get there with no problem, again so we think....

Josh was thinking that the town we are supposed to take this load to is by Decatur and when he is setting it up in the GPS so it will be ready to go when we leave it says it is by Chicago.. Hmm.... we were getting conflicting information from our phone GPS and the truck GPS, we finally get directions on how to get to the stop and that helped us figure out that it is indeed a suburb of Chicago. This means that we are basically out of hours for the day and we have to wait til midnight to get more hours back to drive but we have to be in Chicago by 7 a.m., it is going to be a push to get there on time but Josh says he is confident we can do it. At least we are gassed up and ready to go but here is it around 5 p.m. and he has to sleep to be able to get up at midnight. I just can't do it so I am here in the dark of the truck writing my blog trying to keep the clacking of the keys down.

One other little side note: I did go out to my garden last night and look for the zucchini that both my boys said disappeared, that someone or something had taken them because they weren't there. I do believe that zucchini is the master of camoflage and they have ninja moves so they can't be seen by boys. They are calmer when a woman is near and they practically jump out at you as they want to be caressed and pick up. Yep 5 huge zucchini jumped in my arms and I lovingly showed them to the boys. Alex plans to cut up and fry at least one of them, and once again I am missing home but at least someone is enjoying the fruits of my labor.