Good evening to the Road Crew.  I just now had a chance to sit down and make a blog post.  Tonight I cooked 12 pork chops , 6 big steaks, 4 pounds of ground beef,  and other great grocery items, all vacuum sealed and ready for the freezer.

I tried twice to make the debut of the bigrigtravels road crew Radio show but both times it was less than stellar lol. I will get back to work on it next week.  I figured I tried two different days and if I kept trying I would not have any free time for my days off. Since so many people wanted to see the results anyway,  I have embedded it here. Something for you guys to try is I did manage to get the road crew Radio show to automatically caption.  You can adjust your settings and you will see the ability to turn caption on or off.  I’m not giving up, just I do need to solve an issue or two. Sometimes things can’t be tested in a real world setting until actually doing it live!

We have our next trip lined up and will post it shortly…

Well, sadly, it looks like the data towers got too crowded too fast and we went from 25MB/s upload speed down to less than 1! Looks like everybody got home from work then started playing on the internet. We will have to try again at 9am central time. The mornings, we have been able to maintain the full 25MB/s because everybody is at work. If we fail again tomorrow, we will just postpone it until we get back on the road with a full signal.

Good afternoon to ya Road Crew! So, here is the new feature we are adding to BigRigTravels.com….

We will have our very first Road Crew Radio Show scheduled for 7pm Central time Tuesday night. This Radio Show will be where I discuss a main topic each show then have a few other segments including a chance for callers to call in and talk LIVE on the air with me about the topic first, then near the end of the show we will have Open Mic segment where callers can talk about anything they like. There is a catch about tonight’s show however…. I have been testing many times the last week all across the country but for some reason, the signal is very poor here in Belvidere, Illinois in the evenings. During last night’s testing, the signal was so poor we dropped 76% of the frames and we cannot broadcast under those circumstances! So, we will try to do the show at 7pm as mentioned, but if the signal is n good, we will try again at 9am Wednesday. For some reason, the signal is fantastically fast in the mornings! We will broadcast the show live, and if there are problems, we will edit those out in the final show.

The LIVE call in number for our show is (806)4BigRig or (806) 424-4744. The call in number is only active during the live broadcast. I have allocated 5 lines available, any callers calling in once those 5 lines are full will get a busy signal. When you call, you will follow the prompts and I will get to you when I can. It is important that when you get connected to the show, you turn down the volume on YouTube and talk normally on your phone as to prevent feedback… and of course the slight delay between us actually talking on the phone and when it gets broadcast over the air, the built in delay might confuse you lol.

The email directly for the Radio Show is RoadCrewRadio@BigRigTravels.com to send your topic ideas, suggestions, and show comments.

Let’s hope we can go LIVE at 7pm, with chatroom opening up at 630pm. If not, we will try again at 9am Wednesday. See ya there!!

We are almost to our delivery in Rochelle, Illinois. Right after we drop this trailer we will begin our time off. Be sure to watch the blog Tuesday for a special announcement!

Friday February 8th 2019 is our 11th anniversary! Starting right now, we are adding another feature page to the BigRigTravels website. If you look at the menu, click on the Trip Journal. AFTER each load is completed, we will add it to the journal so you can get a better idea of the places we have been, temperature settings, mileage, etc. You can sort any column as well as use the search bar for anything you like! The table unfortunately is not mobile friendly at this time, so it is best viewed on a desktop or laptop.

Also, we made our delivery today here in Johnstown, New York a full 24+ hours early. We are currently waiting for our next trip to be assigned. Speaking of this truckstop…… this is the place we started testing out switching from the old original, laptop driven, snowman images to the newer, easier automatic snowman images directly from the phones! The below images are from the last of the old snowman way of doing things to the newer phone cameras:) Click each image for the full version, then click back in your browser.

Good Sunday afternoon to ya. We are just dragging our feet a bit since we have a later afternoon delivery scheduled and we can’t arrive too early. We already have the next trip lined up and it will be a longer trip than this one from California.

Good morning/afternoon! We finally got to make our delivery last night in Layton, Utah. Man, it sure felt like Ground Hog day for sure with all the back and forth trips trying to get things done. Finally I am happy to report we got rid of the stuff in the trailer! After delivery, we dragged the empty trailer back down to the shop so that they could give it it’s federal inspection which is due February 1st. Since there were no available empty trailers, we were given authorization to bobtail to the shipper. Since it was already 2am or so, we decided to stop just short of the shipper to take a nap. We will gain back hours to drive again in a few minutes when we will head on to the shipper. It is a preloaded trailer so things should go smoothly. We won’t broadcast the few blocks from the truckstop to the shipper, but as soon as we sign the bills and get going, we will start broadcasting and begin the trip to Texas! So glad to be rid of that goobersnort trip from California!

Well we woke up this morning and fought traffic to drop this load in a drop yard as planned. Now, I get word that we will in fact make the final delivery and it will be a live unloading delivery. Since we started our clocks early this morning, the delivery will start about our 13th hour. In order for us to legally do this trip successfully, we will now have to do an 8 hour split sleeper, which means we have to sit still for 8 hours before rolling towards the delivery. This 8 hour split sleeper rule suspends our 14 hour clock enabling us to make the delivery and not worrying about running past our original 14 hour limit.

Sit tight as we sit still for 8 hours. We will start broadcasting the trip to delivery about 5pm mountain time. We do have our next trip lined up so we can put this mess behind us and roll on down the highway. The next trip loads tomorrow morning and is preloaded.

Well, Well. The original plan had us dropping this loaded trailer at the customer at 8pm Wednesday night. Then, since we were running more than 24 hours early, arrangements were supposedly made to drop Tuesday before 6pm. We arrived at the gate and learned “a lack of communication” had occurred and no early deliveries were authorized. We will not wait and pay for this mistake but rather, take this to a drop yard Wednesday morning and let someone else make the final delivery while we get our next trip lined up. We will broadcast the trip back to Salt Lake City tomorrow.

Good morning. We got a full new set of 70 hours to work with now! We took our loaded trailer to a local dropyard since the delivery appointment was changed to Monday. We will find an empty somewhere and use it for the next shipper.

Good Saturday morning from sunny and warm California! We have our next two trips lined up. We will sit here in Hesperia and complete our 34 hour restart. Early Sunday morning we will drive to a drop yard and drop our current load since the delivery appointment was changed to Monday. After dropping this tomorrow we will hopefully find an empty trailer and head to the shipper for a live loading appointment. Once loaded, we will drag that one to the drop yard then find another empty trailer for our second load which live loads Monday morning. Once loaded on Monday we will head to the final delivery destination. We will broadcast everything as we normally do starting Sunday morning. Today I will relax, clean the truck, maybe get it washed up nicely, and play with website stuff. I think I’ll even try a drone flight of this area later today. So, no driving today, it might be a good time to watch the recorded videos I made the other day in Southern Utah.