Barely legal and entirely tiring

The PetSmart folks did their thing at 0300 and by 0400 I was rolling up to Fort Collins. I needed beer: specifically, 44,300 pounds of Bud and Busch Lite headed off to a distributor in Kansas City, Kansas.


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The Bud facility has scales and even though I had the tandems as far forward as possible, I was still over several hundred pounds on my drives. Not a huge problem since I do get an extra 400 pounds over the limit for my APU (in some places) and my gross vehicle weight was around 79,200. Still, I only had a half tank of fuel and orders were to fuel in Colby, Kansas.

My solution was to just fill the left tank, adding 75 gallons or about 500 pounds. Most of the scales to Kansas City were open and I got the green PrePass light on all but one. That one had a nice repeater setup so the driver can see his weights as he puts each set of tires on and it showed my drives at 34,200. Didn't get stopped.

The way I drove was 680 miles from start to finish and I logged 12 on-duty hours after also accounting for the pre-trip, trailer swapping and fueling.

The consignee in Kansas City is off a small side street that leads down past train tracks then into a small business park area. None of it intended for semis and 53 foot trailers. I made use of the deserted parking lot of a nearby business to get turned around properly to make the dock the parked along the side of the street until this morning when they opened and the unloading took place.

No preplan for a change. They have been doing better with them of late but no one is perfect, apparently.