Ft. Pierce, Florida - March 2009

Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in the back lot of one of the two (side-by-side, go figure) Pilot truck stops in sunny Ft. Pierce, FL. Much nicer than Kearney, NJ. This is a fairly small truck stop, as truck stops go, and it's pretty clean and well-lighted -- which means is smells better than most truck stops. The larger truck stops tend to smell pretty funky, especially in warmer weather, because truckers are too lazy to walk the 100 or so yards to the bathroom at 3AM. So, little puddles of stank magically form under many of the trucks overnight. But, this place is all concrete, and has enough lights to make taking a mid-night leak in the parking lot a little too obvious.

Beth's folks spend three months each winter at Port St. Lucie, which is only about 11 miles from here, so she got to spend last night at her folks - catching up with them and doing laundry. They'll come and get me in a little while and I'll get to spend some of the afternoon with them, have a beer or two and maybe watch some golf or March Madness with my father-in-law. I had to stay with the truck last night because we have a load on board, and the truck has to be attended overnight. We're carrying almost 45,000 pounds of corn seed destined for Iowa City, Iowa. The seed came into the country through Miami on a cargo ship from Europe. So, all this begs the question: Why is Iowa buying corn seed from anywhere other than Iowa? Isn't that a little like selling ice to Eskimos?

We're in the process of what is called a 34-hour restart - where we have to take 34 consecutive hours off (we can stagger that so we only really have to sit idle for about 22-23 hours) and all of our available driving/on duty hours reset to zero. It happens when you're very busy, so that's a good sign. We've really been hustling this past ten days or so ... Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Kenosha, Chicago, Baltimore, Norfolk, Syracuse, Memphis, Miami - and currently in Ft. Pierce. We'll leave here around here 8-9PM tonight, and be in Iowa City in plenty of time for a 7AM delivery on Tuesday morning.