Off Road Adventure, New Customer And Visiting The Trailer Park.

What a crazy day. I get asked to handle new customers fairly often. Maybe its because I'm mule headed enough to get it done, or because I have good customer service skills and am able to complete the job with little to no structure and support.

When I got this load assignment and did my recon, I noticed several off things. It appeared to be bulk or bagged sand or gypsum and the reciever was listed as a clothing distributor. Both addresses didn't exist, the shipper was an empty field at a trailer park and the receiver was an apartment or strip mall.

After several conversations with my DM , she explained that it's a new account and that the account manager stated that Google maps for the shipper was correct.

I managed to shoehorn Edna down the one lane road between trailers, junk cars and generally an area that looked like it was out of the series Breaking Bad. Sure enough, it's an empty field.

Several residents came out and it started resembling a mob. I spoke with them, they said that the companies keep sending truckers to the wrong address because if they knew ahead of time how bad the road is to the mine, they would turn down the load. I assured them that we would get it listed correctly in our dispatch info, that our company really does care about their neighborhood and apologized profusely. Also asked if they mind if I used several of their front yards and driveways to turn around.

I was actually on the phone to my DM at the time, explaining that "not a business here" means wrong address. The folks generally took my side and thanked me for at least going slow and talking with them.

Turns out that the shipper is a marble quarry about 20 miles away, up a pretty rough dirt road. I find the gps coordinates for it and opt to do it. My DM says it's my choice, but if I get stuck or damage the truck that it won't be adverse to me.

The road has some bad washboard and is pretty rough in areas, but passable. Some of my fairings break plastic fastners but they do that routinely and are already scheduled for replacement anyway. The trucks that go to the mine don't seem to have the same aerodynamic parts as our otr trucks. I locked in the second drive axle as my traction control kept dinging and going off. Other than it being rough and kicking the trailer a little here and there it was fine.

I finally after 5 hours got loaded, it was a CA load, 34440 on the drives so I moved the 5th wheel up 1. Tandems were all the way up at 33900 It got me legal.

On the way back, the washboard was really bad. I figured that since it wasn't good traction that it's probably best to not use the Jake as I didn't want the trailer skipping sideways from the washboard and loosing it. I kept it slow and tried to avoid the really rough sections.

As for the receiver, I did some Google kung-fu and found out that it's actually a tile and pool company next door to the clothing distributor. I verified with them and sent all the correct info to my DM.

All in all, a pretty interesting day.

Whew! Good job getting it done!

was an empty field

I have had quite a few of these google searches lately scouting out my deliveries. So far I’ve been lucky and there was a building or house there upon arrival. There is currently a lot of new construction of industrial parks and housing developments in our service area. Some of the completed and fully functioning warehouses still show up as pre construction on google maps. I wish they would at least update the arial view more often.

Davy, I’m beginning to think you are the modern day “Travelin’ Man” from the Ricky Nelson classic song.

“I’m a travelin’ man and I’ve made a lot of stops ….”

LOL

I wish they would at least update the arial view more often.

I posted a while back in another thread (a thread about an outdated map of a Dollar General location) that I discovered that Google Earth often has more current images than Google Maps. It's worth checking out, IMO.