The report from September

Nearly the end of September and I feel like I haven't done much this month. Until I look at the photos.

Due to a problem with my new truck, coupled with a 34 hour reset, I ended up spending four nights and three days in Augusta Georgia. Nice town, with an unpaved bike trail alongside the canal that put the town on the map.

I took a boat trip on the canal that explained the history of the area. Having lived in an old mill town in New England, it was interesting to visit the primary southern city to which most of the fabric mills in New England eventually moved. Also very interesting to me as a Yankee, Augusta was the center of the confederacy's industrial base.

This one canal, promoted and developed by the son of the town's mayor, way back in the 1850s, made it the ideal spot for the production of gun powder for the confederacy in the 1860s, among other things necessary for the war effort. Strangely, Sherman's march through the south entirely avoided Augusta. Hmmm.

While in Augusta, I happened upon an auction of stuff for the benefit of a newborn with heart troubles who's mother is the member of a local roller derby team. One of the items on auction was this "sword" (more like a long dagger), of exquisite design (and sharp as hell). I would have priced it at $200 or more, but the highest bid was only $10. So my $20 bid ended up winning. Since the last thing I need on the truck is a sixteen inch long dagger, I made a deal with the pub hosting the event: They keep the dagger on the wall of the pub until the next charity auction at which they must auction it off with the understanding that the buyer must again give it back to the pub to put back on the wall. Rinse and repeat. I told enough people about the deal that I trust the pub will honor my deal. I'll be very interested to come back in a few years and see how much money that dagger has raised.

I don't remember exactly where this was, somewhere in peach country, but a water tower shaped as a peach certainly caught my attention.

I picked up a trailer in Ticonderoga New York and after driving sixty miles along a road that should not have trucks on it, I spent the night in a rest area only to find in the morning that this is what two of the tires on the trailer looked like. Fortunately I was able to get them replaced within a few miles of the rest area. Yes, those are the steel belts showing through on the tire.

My typical day of food, sitting on the passenger seat.

I spent a week in the Bethlehem/Allentown PA region making local deliveries for C+S Wholesale Grocers to primarily A&P and Stop and Shop grocery stores in eastern PA and northern NJ. Fortunately, I had to do a 34 hour reset so I parked in Allentown.

Cute town. Very working class with a huge chunk of the population living in downtown Allentown. This tree-lined street was a bit unusual. Most of the town looks like 8th avenue in the 40s and 50s in Manhattan . I got to bike down the old mule path along the canal paralleling the Lehigh river to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem, once the capital of steel production in the US, has fortunately kept the old steel mills relatively intact but converted them into a civic center which was hosting a blues festival while I was there. Riding down the bike path on the north side of the river, the blues from the south side was like a siren's song for me.

Seen in a highway rest stop in Indiana.

One morning northwest of Lafayette Indiana in a region filled with wind turbines (though, knowing something about wind turbines, I wonder who would have been willing to endure a longer than 20 year ROI on these babies. There simply is not enough wind in Indiana to make these things cost-effective.)

I made a delivery to a grocery store on the south side of Chicago which had this sign on the wall. Go make something happen. I like that.

I'm now doing an unintentional 34 hour reset in the town of "State College" (believe it or not) Pennsylvania. I'm very glad I parked here last night instead of the truckstop 28 miles in the other direction from my drop-off point last night. Very cute town and home of Penn State. I got to do my laundry and bombed around campus on the bike, riding like a wild man and scaring the kids. LOL

Travels in August

My last month with England allowed me to get a bit off-route through some parts of the country I'd never seen before. I started the month in Fresno and headed back east.

This is the Very Large Array radio telescope in west central New Mexico. If you click on the photo and zoom in, you can see this is one of the three arms of multiple dishes in a row. It's a beautiful, desolate high valley completely surrounded by mountains, which is why this location is perfect for listening to radio signals from outside of Earth.

I spent a night in Roswell New Mexico, the Alien capital of the world (Google it if you haven't heard about this).

Even Walmart plays up the alien angle. Surprisingly, Roswell is a huge grower of Pecans. The northwestern outskirts of town are entirely covered by pecan tree orchards. Unfortunately, Roswell has been suffering from a great and long drought.

Abilene Texas where it was 104 degrees with almost no humidity. I biked eight miles into town and had to sip water every few minutes to keep my throat from getting stuck closed. This part of Texas is also suffering from the same drought. Very dry.

In Memphis I visited an ice cream and bike shop which was manufacturing and selling this hybrid electric bicycle.

A thunderstorm at sunrise in Oklahoma.

And I took a long lunch break just southwest of St.Louis and took a cave tour.

E.N.G.L.A.N.D. stands for . . .

Soon after I started driving for CR England in January, someone told me what a number of the trucking company names are actually acronyms for. WERNER----We Employ Rookies No Experience Required, CFI --Cant Find Interstate, SWIFT---Sure Wish I Finished Training or Sexy Women in Freightliner Trucks, CRST ---Cedar Rapids Stunt Team, and ENGLAND ---Every New Guy Leaves After Ninety Days. Interestingly, on my 86th day of solo driving for England, and six weeks without a day off, I started to feel bad vibes coming from both my driver manager and England corporate. Despite my weekly reports putting me in the top 20% of drivers in every category - miles run, on-time deliveries, highest fuel mileage, etc. - I was getting clear indications that England no longer wanted me. A quick survey of other trucking companies revealed JB HUNT (Just Beginning to Hold Up Nation's Traffic) which seemed to have all the requirements I was seeking and would also give me a 57% pay raise to $0.41/mile (the highest pay I could find for a driver with only six months of experience). On my 100th day of solo driving, I returned my truck to England, took a week off in Salt Lake and made a quick trip down to Great Basin National Park where I got up to 11,400.

Orientation for JB Hunt was in Memphis Tennessee so I found a cheap flight to St.Louis (got all my stuff down to two fifty pound containers, one of them the case for the bike that converts into a bike trailer (as seen in the photo),biked 20 miles along the Mississippi, tasted some great beer, attended a blues festival, and at three in the morning caught a Greyhound to Memphis. Orientation took four days and now I'm back on the road, currently doing a 34 hour reset in Augusta Georgia after a quick visit to Tulsa (a very nice town (with incredible bike trails) which I hope I can explore more in the future ). My truck is pretty much the same as the one I drove for England except I realized just yesterday (after four days of driving) that this transmission is a ten speed instead of a nine. I'd been shifting from 4th to 6th and wondering why it was such a big rpm jump. Duh.