The late-late show

Ah, the evening routine. It was last night around 8 PM and I was relaxing in my truck, basking in the warmth of my bunk heater and taking care of some chores. The cat was snoozing away (in her castoff cardboard box bottom scavenged from a case of bottled water; her $30 fuzzy cat bed lays unused now), the dirty clothes neatly bagged up, the floor vacuumed.

I had just polished off a nice salad and was in the process of getting ready for bed.

BEEP! I wish I could turn that satellite unit off sometimes.

"Can you run to Ames, Iowa and bring back a load tonight?" This was shortly followed up by a phone call from one of the night dispatchers, my old fleet dispatcher Ross. We went back and forth over the details and I eventually acquiesced.

As I got dressed my log nagged at the back of my head then I remembered. I arrived yesterday morning with only 2.25 hours left in my book and I picked up nothing today. At midnight I would get 7.5 hours back to run with but this would mean this little side trip would scotch my 34-hour restart and force me to sit all tomorrow after I delivered the load. This would be a cluster of the first order so I walked over to dispatch and braced the monster in his lair.

So, late this morning I was put on a FedEx relay from our yard in Omaha to Henderson, Colorado. It was a nice 525-mile run due in tonight and I had a couple hours to spare. One of those hours was burned up waiting for a small trailer repair then I was hooked up and on my way.

The fuel plan for the trip had me filling the tanks at our yard at $2.56 a gallon. Since I get a daily preview of the next day's fuel prices I knew (from yesterday's report) that fuel in Denver was six cents cheaper but at midnight local time it would rise by about six cents. Therefore, after I finished the FedEx festivities I dropped down into Denver and filled my tanks. I also swapped out my locking fuel caps for the regular kind as winter is upon us and enough ice and other gunk makes its way inside the locks to be quite a pain.

Along the way to Henderson I was preplanned with a long deadhead out to Lexington, Nebraska for tomorrow to deliver a load late tomorrow night to Emporia, Kansas.