Trip #29: North Hollywood, CA to Ottawa, IL

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See that map? That is my run for the first half of this week. The trip I just ran down to Phoenix was about 1,300 miles and this one is over 2,300, including deadhead. By far the longest trip I've had at Hill Bros. Much good karma is in store for my dispatcher. Believe it.

The parking situation in North Hollywood was TIGHT, however. I looked it up on my Garmin before I departed and noted that the shipper was down a dead-end street. Loading wasn't much better, as they had a forklift to run out each pallet to the truck then a hand cart I had to use to move the pallet up to the front of the box.

There was a note on the load screen that said I had to call a certain person at HQ once I found out how many pallets it would be. Rut roh. It turns out that they try to match up several smaller loads into full truckloads heading back east and a different shipper in the Los Angeles area had enough pallets to fill out the back of the trailer so I had to detour over to Fontana and get that taken care of before I departed for real.

The traffic around LA wasn't too bad; much better than Vegas was a few hours later for some reason.

Temps were in the low triple digits once I made it to the desert area north of LA. When I pulled in at the Flying J in St George, Utah this evening to fuel and pack it in it showed 104 degrees while I was rolling down the freeway and 120 once I got to the parking area.