Another Tuesday. Mara is at the truck stop. I've been rushing around trying to get some things done. I didn't update much of anything yesterday. I didn't have time. Last week was really screwed up. Our customer in Bedford Park had rejected a trailer, which caused us problems all week. Whenever they do that, we have to pull the rejected trailer out and bring another empty trailer back. That works great in theory.

The problem is, when we tried to do that last week, the dropyard in Chicago 1) had no room for our trailer, and 2) had no empties. So we had to take the trailer back to Bedford Park and drop it. When we got back up there on last Wednesday morning, we tried again. This time we were allowed to drop the trailer, but the dropyard still had no empties. So Friday we had take our usual empty down from Waukegan, drop it, and then go looking for another empty (the customer has to have a certain number of trailers). There still were no trailers at the dropyard in Chicago, so Mara wound up going all the way back up to Waukegan and pulling out another trailer.

Keep in mind that all this takes time. That last extra trip up to Waukegan and back took over 2 hours. You add up all the delays for the entire week, and it's pretty obvious how we wound up getting so far behind. When you add in the fact that on Thursday we had to be live loaded in Bedford Park (a 4 1/2 hour delay) and that on Saturday we lost another hour or so because our pickup number in North Cove, NC was bad, and it's no small wonder that we didn't get home yesterday until after 1pm. Neither of us were particularly happy about it, but what do you do?

Hopefully this week will be better. We're about due. Hell, the week before that we only ran 4 trips. First our Freightliner wasn't ready, and that cost us 2 runs. Then Ray (bless him) got us the Volvo. Getting routed over to Medway, Ohio to pick it up and the time it took us to physically move in cost us another 2 runs. Short week! Then it was followed by last week, which was a nightmare.

We're about due for a good week. I won't get my hopes up, though. The worse thing about getting in so late is that you don't really feel like you've even been home. It's not like taking a break. Oh, hey. It's better than staying on the road the whole time, but it seems like about the time you've started to relax it's time to leave again.