Evening to everybody. Well, sometimes the world of trucking is boring to the average viewer. Not much to blog about other than we arrived, we stopped, etc. On occasion things get wild and I get to mention something other than the long days of just sitting behind the wheel or sitting in a truckstop.
We were sitting in the Love’s truckstop in St Joseph, Missouri waiting for our delivery early Tuesday morning. Our trip has been a slow one because of the holiday weekend. We have had our trailer for a few days now and it has been behaving and running the way it was designed to do. Yesterday though, I noticed it wasn’t cooling down and holding the temperature steady at the proper temperature. When it gets humid and hot for long periods of time, sometimes a driver must do a manual defrost to clear the coils of built up ice. 99.9% of the time it all does things automatically.
When there is a problem with the reefer, there is a big light that the driver can see from the side mirror. Usually its green or white when everything is okay and yellow or red when you get an alarm. In addition, everytime I put my key in the door to climb in, I throw my eyes up and physically look at the current temperature. Our trailer was throwing no alarm indications… I noticed the problem by actually eyeballing the control panel display.
I let the reefer run last night and would see if the problem corrected itself. It ran pretty decent today but on one time I noticed the temperature was now running about 30 degrees warmer. Yes, still below freezing, but not where it should be. I tried 7 back to back manual defrost cycles and it didn’t help a thing. Now, things are at the “take action” point. There are no repair shops in St Joseph ; the closest was in Kansas City!
Now, during my walk around in the afternoon, I noticed we had a trailer tire that completely lost its tread. We pulled into the Love’s tire center right there at the truckstop to get that fixed.
Ok, so, now our quiet boring afternoon has suddenly gotten interesting! We are now looking at the last few hours before hitting our 14 hour clock. We drag our trailer down to the Thermo King dealer in Kansas City. We call the 24 hour emergency repair tech in. He’s working on it as I type probably. We dropped the trailer and headed five miles down to our favorite mini truckstop – the QT. Ya know, 22 flavors of slushies and Butter Pecan coffee!! So, as soon as we parked our bobtail in a car parking space, I see the DOT pull up and stop in front of me. That’s the Kansas State Highway Patrol. At first I thought he was going to kick us out. Instead, he said “Good Evening, I saw you down the street and followed you in here. I’d like to do a CVSA inspection on you and your truck”. DOH!!
We passed with no violations. Our trailer is being repaired. We found a good safe place to park. Oh, and our delivery that was supposed to happen at 7am? We now have a window to deliver until 2pm.
As Paul Harvey used to say… “And now ya know the REST of the story”… about how we ended up in Kansas City just hours before our delivery. C’mon. Time to look for Toto!
Update….we just went through Montana… And even though we didn’t use this road, you know it’s coming….
