Baby it's REAL Cold Outside

We arrived in Clear Lake, IA Sunday about 1730 at 18 degrees. Now it's 12. Surely you recall the event that occured here ? Eerie that while coming up I35 the Buddy Holly song "Peggy Sue Got Married" was playing on the Sirius radio. So what am I doing at here at 0300? Well I just haven't gotten the hang of sleeping while the engine is running. My body figures if the engine is running I'm supposed to be in the driver's seat... Not funny. When it's down below 15 you're supposed to keep the engine running, so it is and I am.

On Thursday we spent the evening at the Rosemont oasis headed north. Felt a bit like the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal, not the Hotel California version. We weren't alone for sure, many other folks were spending the evening there. We even observed other folks meeting there. I would recommend it to hole up for a bit.

Friday with 3 drops IN Chicago had it's challenges. We caught all but one bridge lower than 13' 6" before we were committed and had to make one challenging turn around - I didn't say u-turn. One of our addresses was 1360 Ashland. The instructions didn't say north or south but our fuel solution map took us to south. Guess what - there is nothing at south. Another turn around. When we finished at the north address we headed north on Ashland to the 90/94 freeway, but no can't do that, a low bridge. Should have got some pictures, but honestly I was a bit busy... For the record, you also cannot get to I94 north from I90 going east. There's a 13' bridge there, too. You have to go past to, like Addison, and cross over and go back west to go north. Would never have believed that. At least it's marked about a mile in advance.

We finished with the Kmarts at 3:30 and then had to go out to West Chicago in traffic for a pick-up. That was no treat - 2 hours for about 40 miles. That load was headed for Marietta, OK. Hurray, warm weather. On the way through Missouri the temps climbed to 67. Ok, time to bring out the shorts, right ? No way - by Saturday morning it was down into the twenties. We dropped the trailer there, which is just across the border from Dallas on I35, about 3:30 then ran up to Jenks, OK, that's a suburb of Tulsa and picked up a load of toilet paper. Yep, love those. Fully loaded trailer of 15,080 pounds.

This load MUST be delivered at 0800 in Minneapolis, MN this morning. We covered 557 miles to get here to Clear Lake, IA and am leaving at about 4:30 to get to the Target distribution center by 0800. Not particularly fond of this schedule. Hopefully we'll get a bit of a nap some time this morning after delivering, Teresa will make sure of that, don't worry. Not really sure why toilet paper has to be on such a tight schedule... Mostly I think it's service level agreements, regardless of what's in the load. But you would think you were delivering organs for transplant.