Avon calling!

After delivering that load of meat in Chicago I was told to head north about 25 miles to Glenview, Illinois to an Avon distribution center to pick up a load heading to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I had been to this place before and the last turn you have to take to get there is very tight -- as in, swing wide to the left as far as possible and turn hard right to make the single lane turn. If anyone was offended they got over it.

I was told the load wouldn't be ready until 1700 but I got there early hoping it might leave sooner. It was, and right at 1500 I was loaded up, sealed up and revved up heading out to the closest freeway. The traffic was heavy but moving, and more building up as time passed but I made it to I-90 heading out of town at the forefront of a large wave of automobiles rushing to leave the city.

Last night I was at Albert Lea, Minnesota and I arrived this morning at 1130 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at the local UPS facility. Avon loads thousands of packages on to a trailer then they get injected into the UPS system closer to their destination. I suppose this saves them a lot of money.

What it does not save is time on my part, as they told me the trailer would be empty in about four hours. This did give me time to head over to the nearby Pilot to have one of my super single tires looked at (it wasn't keeping pressure as well as the other three), have lunch and grab a shower.

UPS finished with the trailer around 1500 and I took off to the nearby town of Round Lake, Minnesota to pick up 38,000 pounds of candy heading to the Menards distribution center in Shelby, Iowa. Why Menards, a competitor of Home Depot and Lowes, needs 19 tons of candy is beyond me.

The candy people had a trailer preloaded for me so I dropped my empty in a door and hooked up to the new one. This was interrupted by the yard driver informing me the trailer wasn't clean enough to pass muster and I had to go back and sweep it out. It was 90 degrees out and humid, so by the time I finished that (pointless) task that shower I had taken a few hours prior wasn't wearing too well.

Why pointless? I spent a good 20 minutes sweeping out small pieces of pallets, a bit of dust and a small amount of plastic -- a total amount that would fit in an adult's cupped hands. The load of candy that would soon be on board has the following protection:

1) The candies are individually wrapped.
2) The individually wrapped candies are bagged in plastic.
3) The bags of plastic individually wrapped candies are placed into cardboard boxes and sealed.
4) The sealed cardboard boxes filled with bags of individually wrapped candies are stacked on pallets then the pallets are shrink wrapped.

I think it fair to say if I had butchered a goat for a pagan sacrifice in the back of the trailer and let the blood and intestines drop where they may the shrink wrapped pallets of cardboard boxes filled with bags of individual plastic candies would have made out just fine.

My truck and stinky self drove south to a rest area near the consignee for this load and took a 10.