To the Front Range!

I've been not doing a whole lot of driving of late as freight is "soft" i.e. (brace yourself) the economy is not doing too well.
I drove down to the droptlot and then got a ride with Mylie, a Hawai'ian/Portugese lady who drives a truck based out of Portland. She was coming down from having just picked up a load in Seattle which she would drop in Portland for some home time. I had to get a ride with her because my truck was in Portland but my parking location is in Sumner, a small town with a heavily industrial north end, near Tacoma (about 39 miles south of Seattle.
I found my truck (inexplicably older than my last truck. One side benefit of transfering to the west coast, i thought, would be that I could almost certainly get a newer truck. well HA HA mark, of the 10% of the fleet that could be older than my last truck I won the lottery!) and settled in. The next morning I met with dispatcher, a nice guy from South Dakota who seems to be in the northwest for similar reasons to mine. I think we will get along well, at least as far as drivers and dispatcher typically do. (NB I am not the sort of asshole driver who thinks his dispatcher is trying to ruin his day.)
Then I hopped back in my truck and got a load with two stops, one on the far side of portland, out on the spit of land where the Willamette River empties into the mighty Columbia. The second stop was in Fife, Washington, right outside of beautiful Tacoma. (Tacoma, for those of you not familiar with the area, is seattle's ugly little sister. It is the Camden to Seattle's Philadelphia, the Gary to it's Chicago. Which probably isn't fair and I am sure there are lots of good things about Tacoma (and Gary and Camden) It often reeks of the "tacomaroma" the heady overcooked broccoli stank of paper making.
It's name is the Lushootseed (Puyallup) name for Mt. Rainier (Mother of Waters) whose presence on the southeastern horizon (on a clear day) is incredible). It is a much busier port than Seattle, importing goods from Asia that are then shipped by rail eastward across the country (like the busier port of LA/Long Beach, to the south).)
After making the delivery in Fife I headed over to the dropyard in Sumner and hopped in my car and headed over to Fred Meyer to buy some food for the next few weeks. Fred Meyer is a PNW chain of mega stores similar to Wal*Mart but somehow when you walk in they seem even more immense. When I returned to my truck I found I had gotten a new load assignment. A pick up at NYK logistics (a place that takes imports and sorts them out to be delivered to various locations (such as Target DCs, where this one was going) The place was conveniently, literally, next door (or gate) and so I popped over, picked up the trailer, and came back to the drop yard.
The load was going to Topeka, Kansas, a nice long one (1800 miles) though curiously out of my range (my new job description is Western Regional (meaning I drive the 11 western states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico). When I discussed this the next day with my dispatcher we eventually decided to relay it in Denver, still a healthy run (1200 miles).
From there I got a load of baled scrap cardboard from a Safeway DC in Denver on its way down to a paper mill that makes new cardboard out of old cardboard in Prewitt, New Mexico. Apparently when we pull these cardboard loads into Prewitt we often pull loads of new stock out of Prewitt and typically these go to Southern California, putting you on the I-5 and making a return up to the northwest easier. (Not a lot of freight goes up to the Northwest, other than up from southern California or from Mexico (Laredo, Nogales or Otay Mesa (Tijuana))
Inexplicably the load I got was headed back to Denver.