Armstrong Air and Space Museum

On Tuesday (11/9/10), sort of by accident, or at least not originally by plan, I visited the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, OH.  Yes, that's right, Wapakoneta, OH.  I went near there on one of my early driveaway trips through Ohio, and thought it would be nice to someday come back and visit the museum of the first man to walk on the moon.  So I did.

It started on Sunday with a truck coming out of Forest, VA and going to a relatively new area for me, Alma, MI.  I decided to leave on Sunday since I really wasn't busy, it was a really nice day, and it's easier to do your driving on Sunday than on typical weekdays.  I picked up a new Ford F750 tree service truck around 7:30 AM and headed west.  There are a lot of ways to get to Michigan from Virginia, but I mostly followed wherever the ole Garmin Nuvii 465T took me, which was up through southeastern Ohio, around Columbus, and stopping for the night in Marion, OH.

I stopped at a nice Comfort Inn, but had pulled into its parking lot before I realized there was no outlet, only the entrance, and no way around the motel.  The parking lot was too small to turn around in without backing up.  And that's my cardinal rule while towing - don't get in a situation where you have to back up, because you can't without wiping out your toad.  So I had to unhook, turn the truck around, move into an out-of-the-way parking spot, and hook back up.  Not that it's a big deal with the type of tow bar I have, but just an activity I'd rather not have to do after the initial hookup.  I even positioned the truck in a way to protect the parking space in front of me so I'd be able to pull out in the morning.

The next morning, when I went out to the truck early, I saw that some dummy had parked his 22 foot Ryder Rental Truck in such a way as to block me in.  So I had to unhook again, move my truck, and rehook again.  In the hundreds of tows I've done, I've only had to unhook one other time, and that was while driving a crane truck that wouldn't turn around on a football field.  And on this trip, I had to unhook twice at one stop.  My record was screwed.

On to Alma on another beautiful driving day.  I delivered around noon.  Dispatch initially had a truck in Wisconsin, which would have been about a 380 mile deadhead, but seemed doable.  But after further checking it was determined that the customer would not let me tow with that truck.  So dispatch told me to head south to Ft. Wayne, IN, where they'd been having trucks come available and thought one might be ready by the time I did the 180 miles deadhead.

Unfortunately, as I arrived near Ft. Wayne, there was no truck, so dispatch advised that I should just start heading back toward home.  That's when I got the bright idea of visiting the space museum.  I could drive about 140 more miles to Wapakoneta, stay there for the evening, visit the museum the next morning, and maybe by then a truck would come available in the area and head me on a paid trip back toward home, which was still 440 miles away.

I had to wait until 9:30 AM for the museum to open, which drove me crazy since I'd been up since 4:30 AM (combination of sleeplessness while on the road, a bad cold, and still adjusting to standard time).  I spent about an hour in the museum, got in my tow car heading back east, and called dispatch to see if anything had come available.  Unfortunately, no go, so I kept deadheading toward home.  Nothing came available, so I drove the whole 440 miles home, a deadhead totaling about 712 miles.  That makes this a second not-so-well-paying trip in a row.

I'd had several really good paying trips this fall, but the last two have been busts.  So goes the driveaway business.