Trip #21: Council Bluffs, IA to Carthage, MO

My go-home load this time is the familiar ConAgra load heading to Carthage, Missouri. It was fairly hot when I arrived at the shipper to pick up my load, and it wasn't ready so I got to wait for a few hours. During that time a tanker had crashed on the nearest entrance to the interstate and it was closed down for quite some time.

Once I locked on to my trailer I found out that I couldn't slide the trailer tandems. This is an issue from a number of different angles, the most important two being that it makes my truck horribly overweight on my tractor drive tires and taking turns with the tandems all the way back takes an incredible amount of space. Needless to say, the quick answer from the shop when I sent in this information was to bring the trailer to the shop across the river in Omaha to be worked on. After mind-numbing delays getting back to the freeway at an open on ramp I carefully drove it back to HQ and the grease monkeys started tinkering with it.

Another subtle angle that I hadn't fully considered at the time was that there was no real point in scaling the load. For one, I couldn't get to either of the scales on the way back due to the interstate closures. Secondly, the only information I would get that would be useful would be the total weight, as my axle weights would be wayyy out of whack.

One heckuva storm battered the Omaha area last night as I was trying to get to sleep for an early morning start. The winds howled, rain pelted down and there was a very impressive lighting and thunder show. I shot some video that I will post one of these days if I ever find the time to edit the stuff.