Trips 21 and 22 - Knoxville/Copley, OH

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

I had called dispatch on Monday to let them know I was available. They didn't have anything at the time and requested that I call back, which I did several times throughout the day. Don't know why they don't set up to just call me when something comes available, but they always request a callback.

Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, they said they had a truck to go from Forestry Equipment in Forest, VA, about 32 miles from my house, to Knoxville, TN - a 300 mile trip. Occasionally, Spirit Miller also has a chase car sitting someplace that they ask you to take with you. This time, the chase car was already in Forest and they asked I tow it to Knoxville and drive it back. I sort of liked that because it would answer early on one of the great mysteries of each trip - how are you going to get back from wherever you are going?

I picked up the truck in Forest first thing on Wednesday morning. It was a GMC 7500, 6-sp, no radio. With some difficulty, I hooked up the company chase car. There are several of these, and this is the first time I had seen this one - a Hyundai Accent with 368,000 miles on it - well worn. Naturally, after getting everything hooked up, the lights on the chase car wouldn't work. After trying everything I could think of, I called the company tech. guy, but he didn't have any suggestions other than to say the lights often don't work at first due to a poor ground and to go ahead and maybe they would start working after 20 miles or so. They never did work for the entire trip. Since this was a chipper truck with signal lights on both top and bottom on the back, I didn't feel it was a great safety issue, but it was the one pain you have to have with each trip.

The drive to Knoxville was relatively uneventful, except for getting pulled on to the scale at the one weigh station I had to pass through in TN. I'm not sure why I was selected. Usually, my experience has been with a new truck you get to pass on through. I wondered if the weight of the tow car perhaps set the pre-weigh scales off. Anyway, I was hoping they wouldn't notice the non-working tow car lights, and they didn't. So went on and arrived Knoxville around 3:30 pm. I managed to make a wrong turn just as I was arriving at my destination, which sent me down a steep hill to a lawn service company with not much room to turn around with a chase car attached. I sort of jerked it around anyway, and managed to get on down the road to the final destination at Wolf Tree Service.

Everything was fine at the drop off. The tow car actually started, and I began my trip back home. As hard as that car looked, it drove great. I bedded down in Bristol, TN for the night and came on home on Thursday morning. Was a good trip with the exception of the tow car lights.


Sunday, January 29, 2006

The dispatcher had called on Friday rather frantically hoping I could leave right away with another truck from Forest, VA to Copley, OH, just outside of Akron. I wasn't available to go out before Sunday morning - had an oyster feast planned with my mother and family in Augusta County. I did say I could leave Sunday morning, and they insisted that I make the 450 mile trip and get the truck there by Sunday night. I'm not sure why the desparation, but I felt I could do it.

So Sunday morning, bright and early (and still full of fried oysters), I headed to Forest to pick up a chipper/boom truck along with a chipper trailer. I noticed when I arrived at the pickup, that their bull pen gate was open and the chain and lock were gone. More on that later. The truck was an International 4300, 6-sp, no radio - one of my favorites except for the no radio part. I'd found on a previous trip to Houston with a chipper that they tend to offer few problems other than just making sure you stay aware they are back there and not backing over anything. This company does a great job getting their trucks ready, so this one was an easy pre-trip. The chipper was already hooked up and ready to go, so I was on the road to Copley, new area for me, by 8:00 am. Since I had to do 450 miles, I was glad to get an early start.

I hit rain before I got to WV, and drove in that off and on the rest of the way. And as alway, each trip has some little excitement, even if you're driving an International 4300. This one was small excitement, but it did manage to show a Check Engine light twice during the trip - once about an hour into the trip and again about 150 miles from my destination. In both cases, it was enough to really wake me up and keep me watching those gauges as I puttered along.

I took my new toy, a Dell pocket computer with Garmin GPS and mapping software along with me on this trip for the first time. I was testing the Garmin City Select mapping software to see if it could guide me and perhaps, some day, I could quit lugging around so many maps. I also wanted it to provide where fuel was available, etc. It turned out to be a big disappointment. It had pretty good maps, but it kept crapping out on me at all the wrong times and didn't provide very good travel information, so this morning I sent the GPS and mapping software back to Amazon for a refund. I'm profoundly disappointed at this point in that.

I made Copely around 5:30 pm and dropped off at the Extended Stay Hotel. The company had a rental car set up for me to pick up the next morning at the Akron airport. Unfortunately, I found that was 25 miles away and a $50 - $60 cab fare. So the search began for another option. Finally found a shuttle service that would take me there for $20, leaving at 6:20 Monday morning. Since the company reimburses me for taxi fare, I'm not sure why I worry about getting the cheapest rate, but it just bugs me to pay such outlandish fares.

I did use my new Dell PDA to check my email that night, and found that my main mentor in the Driveaway business, Dick Williams, was going to be bringing a truck from Kansas City through Charleston, WV on the way to Henderson, NC. Since I would be returning on Monday via Charleston, I called him and we set up to have lunch at the Tamarack Travel Plaza on I-77/I-64 at Beckley, WV.

The shuttle arrived the next morning right on time, I was at the airport and with the rental car by 7:30 am. Have never had Hertz provide such quick service.

I-77 took me right by the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Akron. I was considering visiting, but the early hour was long before they would open and I wanted to get on to WV and meet Dick at 1:00 pm for lunch. I got to Tamarack a little before noon, and got some exercise for the first time in days by walking around and going up to the very large building on the hill that houses the artist shops, etc. From up there, I could look down on the parking lot and see Dick as he arrived about 1:00 pm (that's him in the little Izuzu box truck in the middle of the picture - click on the picture to enlarge and actually see Dick arriving).

Without sounding too weird, it was a real pleasure to finally meet him. We've exchanged a lot of notes since I first got interested in Driveaway, and he can truly be credited for giving me the information I needed to get started in this. And he's quite an interesting fellow. He retired from the National Weather Service and has been doing driveaway for several years. He's very meticulous, and is just an encyclopedia of driveaway information.

I left Tamarack around 2:15 pm and was home by about 4:45. This trip went about as smoothly as any I've had, but it's always good to get home. I think driveaway is good for at least one thing - it really helps you enjoy coming home a lot more.

Now, more about the chain and lock missing at the pickup on Sunday morning. I got a call from Spirit Miller this afternoon (Tuesday) asking if the bull pen gate had been open when I arrived. I told them it had, and asked what the problem was. They said a truck was missing. They called back later asking if I had seen a brightly colored boom truck on the lot when I picked up. I told them I did vaguely remember such a truck. That's the one that's missing. I'm thinking nobody will notice a big orange boom truck in my back yard :-)