I-5, The Golden State Freeway!

I had a few days off after my last sortie, if you will, to spend in Seattle, and Seattle decided to woo me with clear skies and fair temperatures (but I know better.) I spent the mornings biking around my knew environs and the afternoons eating rich foods and drinking ciders and beers of local origin, which, coming from a place where this is less possible (the local part, not the drinking, we drink plenty in maryland), is really great. On the last night we ate salami from Salumi, Made hamburgers topped with thin slices of green apple and sharp cheddar cheese and made this:





Needless to say the next day i felt like shit.








This week has been, thus far, more what I expected from this new Western gig, I picked up a load in Seattle, also from NYK logistics which you may remember from the previous post, and took it down to Woodland, California, where there is a large and delightful Target Distribution Center. Then, it being sunday, I sat all day and then was assigned a load to pick up the next day in Folsom, east of Sacramento (indeed home of the eponymous prison of Johnny Cash fame). The load had nothing to do with prison but more with soy sauce, in big 5 gallon buckets from Kikkoman. This Soy Sauce was headed to Irving, Texas, but I only took it as far as French Camp (near Stockton) and dropped it for another driver to take the rest of the way. I, meanwhile, picked up a trailer load of Robert Mondavi Wine from Lodi and took it to the Vons warehouse in Santa Fe Springs (So.East LA). Vons is a LA area grocery store owned by Safeway.
Central California is alternately duller than dull and bizarrely wondrous. There are the parts that are unending fields or orchards and there are the parts that are surreal steep green hills folding into themselves, hiding other worlds, possibly, and then you're back in Illinois again.

From there i had a short load picking up a load of Target brand bleach cleanser from its manufacturer (also in Santa Fe Springs) and took those up to yet another Target dc north of Bakersfield.
And as of now I am sitting at a flying J in the central valley breathing in the sometimes lovely, sometimes, repulsive smell of almond trees in bloom. Tomorrow I pick up some sears crap to take to Everett, Washington. Oh the life.










Endless almond trees in the central valley, i had no idea we ate so many almonds.






As a side note, I have started a project of taking portraits of truckers and their dogs. here is one of the first, this is Dennis and his dog, Baby:

Front Range to the Wasatch Front (The Back Range?)

And Then! Another load from Denver back into New Mexico! (I was beginning to get exasperated, I-25 along the front range of the Rockies is beautiful but any road after the 3rd time in a row begins to get old.)
This load was Nestle PureLife Bottled Water from a plant in Denver on its way to a Wal*Mart DC in Los Lunas, NM. I asked the shipping clerk what the source of the water was and he said it was from the Denver municipal supply, i.e. tap water. Now, I know that a lot of bottles water is tap water but this movement struck me as ridiculous.
I know New Mexico is a desert but it has plenty of drinking water which, curiously comes from the Rio Grande, a river with its source in where? Colorado. And how does it get to New Mexico? By trucks running at 6mpg? no, by gravity. hmmmm.
Anyway. Then I got a load to pick up in Roswell, New Mexico, the sight (well biggest town near the sight of) of a "UFO" crash and alien autopsy. Look it up on wikipedia.
Roswell is a different part of New Mexico, part that feels more like Texas or Oklahoma with vast (dry brown) grassy plains and the smell of concentrated herds of dairy cattle all around.
New Mexico, surprisingly is a very productive dairy state and Leprino Foods here operates the worlds largest mozzarella cheese plant making IQF shredded cheese, primarily for pizzas, I would guess. I don't drive a reefer (refrigerated trailer) so I was not here to pick up cheese but rather a byproduct of cheese making.
When you make cheese, you must first separate the milk solids (curds, which will become cheese) from the whey, a protein rich translucent liquid (think what rotten milk in your fridge looks like). If you have a huge cheese plant (ie it would be very hard to do this at home) you can dry this whey into a fine powder, whey protein concentrate, which is used as a nutritional supplement and industrial baking additive.
I trucked this stuff up to Salt Lake City and unloaded at a cold storage warehouse on the west side of town, not far from the shores of the city's namesake body of water. When I opened the trailer doors a rich sweet smell reminiscent of milkshakes, wafted from within. I sit now, at a Pilot on the west side, typing away, waiting for some way to get back to the beautiful northwest.

(looking west on NW 116th or 117th St. in Seattle, down into Carkeek Park and across to the Olympic Mountains (click to enlarge and see the snowy peaks))

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.