I’ve come to the conclusion that hauling flat bed freight is a lot like working for the circus. You need to be an acrobat, a strongman, a contortionist, get to travel all over the country and work for peanuts!! Any one that has done this will know exactly what I’m talking about.
We unloaded our spools first thing Monday morning, and the we headed over to the truck stop with the other 2 of our drivers that unloaded with us. As we sit and wait for the entire day, the picture emerges that there are about 90 of our drivers also in the immediate area waiting for loads as well. Uh-oh, that’s not a good thing at all. It turns out we wait until almost Tuesday afternoon before we take another load, which doesn’t pick up until Wednesday morning. We have to go meet up with another driver and swap trailers, we need a flat bed for this load, and we have a step deck. The load is structural steel and its 60 feet long, so we will be over dimensional, and need permits. The good thing is its only going to Louisiana so we can deliver it on Thursday, and hopefully get something else before the weekend. That was the plan anyway.
The trip over to Louisiana goes very well. The weather is mid-seventies, sunny, no wind or humidity and just about perfect. I keep looking in the bayous for ‘gators, but all I see are wading birds, white egrets and blue and grey herons. We travel through miles of rice paddies and crawfish farms. Over the Mississippi river and over Lake Pontchartrain,with its view of N’Awlins. We are delivering in Belle Chasse, LA, which is south of New Orleans, on the Gulf, and we see a slew of tug boats and marine cranes. They have this enormous construction project, a huge cement sea wall and there must be 20 cranes in a row working on this.
Right now we are sitting here in Louisiana, waiting for the forklift to unload us, its about 7:30 am, the sun is shining and its already 60 degrees, its going to be another beautiful day, weather-wise.
We will see what the rest of the day brings………..