Kansas Mississippi Texas Iowa Nebraska Texas

They've been keeping me running around with a lot of short loads.
After delivering the insulation it was up to Ottawa, Kansas where, adjacent to the American Eagle Outfitters National Distribution Center there is a place that makes big I-beams. I took two of them, each 40 feet long and 4 feet tall, to a Steel Mill in Mississippi. The website for the mill said it was located in "a growing manufacturing infrastructure in the Southern United States." This struck me as odd. For years the industrial infrastructure has been the domain of the north, especially the Rust Belt area around the Great Lakes and of course it has been in decline for a long time. When you think Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh you don't think "hey those places are really on the up and up!" Much of this is due to the unfortunate outsourcing of manufacturing to places where whose governments don't have strict laws about treating people fairly and paying them a living wage, where quality is lower and materials cheaper, so much so that even with the (ever increasing) cost of transporting these products thousands of mile by land sea and air they are still less expensive. It seems odd then that here is a burgeoning manufacturing in the Southeast. One the one hand great, jobs in the US, people being paid fair(er) wages and being treated well (enough) but on the other hand it seems a bit backward, to industrialize an area that for a long time (since the beginnings of this country) has been agricultural and let the rusting hulks in the north continue to dissolve into the earth. I'm sure it makes sense somewhere, probably in ledger or stock portfolio.

From there (there being Columbus, Mississippi in the northeast part of the state, I headed to the other side of town and picked up some floor joist, through some straps over them and took them to Justin, Texas on the northeast side of Fort Worth. Justin, Texas is where they make Justin boots which you might be aware of, if you are ware of things like western boot manufacturers.
Then it was over to Royse City on the far east side Dallas to get some Trailer Axles. Axles for the sort of trailers you might tow behind a pickup to transport tools or a vehicle. There were 3 stops, one in Grandview, Missouri and two in a little town in southwestern Iowa called Clarinda (birthplace of big band leader Glenn Miller and 4-H and home to WWII internment camp for German, Japanese and Italian POWs (what a place! thanks Wikipedia)).
I made the first two stops and then headed north out of town to the third. As it turns out H&H trailers who on their website claim to be "The World's Best Trailer Value" can sell you a trailer so cheeeep because they build them with prison labor. (There is no mention of this on the website).
To enter their facility on the grounds of the Clarinda Correctional Facility (which describes itself as "an adult male medium-security prison to serve primarily chemically dependent, mentally retarded and socially inadequate offenders" one must enter through a dual gate system (sort of like an air lock) and have one's truck searched and be frisked. I think it would have been nice to know about this before hand. The delivery went smoothly though and in no time I was out of there and sitting behind the Super8 waiting for my next load.
That next load would take me to Norfolk, Nebraska (inexplicably pronounced 'Nor-Fork'* and childhood home of Johnny Carson) Far on the northeast side of town there is a big steel mill and in a quick pick up I loaded up with 9 coils of steel bar about 3/4" in diameter. These were destined for Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, via Laredo, Texas, USA.



* I guess it's not that inexplicable, Wikipedia offers this: "The name "Norfolk" is traditionally pronounced "Norfork" by Nebraskans. When the city was incorporated (as a village) in 1881, it was named after the "north fork" tributary of the Elkhorn River on which it lies. The United States Postal Service assumed that "Norfork" was a mistake and changed the name to "Norfolk". This became the official spelling, but the local pronunciation did not change."