Ground hog day

We made it to my aunt's Thursday afternoon, and had a great dinner with her, her husband, and cousins from my mom's side. They have an RV in the park next to my aunt's, and oh by the way, he used to be a trucker and now delivers RV's for a large RV dealership with my Dad.
It's really surprising how many people we talk to that have a family member who trucks, or a close friend. There are alot of us out here!
We made it over to Calexico and dropped the trailer that night and went o the board,,,or at least that was what we were told on the Qualcom. We decided to just go to bed and get some sleep until the Qualcom chirped with an assignment msg. Well, we got to sleep all nite. got upabout 6am and I called in to check status on the board. I was told we weren't on the board. Hmmm,,so I replied on the qualcom using the msg that said we were on the board from last nite. Told them we called in and was not listed. It didn't take long for them to remedy that situation. :)
We were something like #14 on the list and #4 for teams, so we bobtailed into town to the Walmart to stock up. 6:30 should be a good time to hit a Walmart,,,,,right?
I could tell we were in trouble as soon as I could see the parking lot. There were about 10 busses that are used to transport migrant farm workers that work all the fields in the area. I guess they gather there, then leave for the fields later. They were all over the store and all the stockers were out filling the isles. NOT a good time, but we made it. I don't think we heard one announcement on the store's PA system in english the entire time we were there. Maybe we crossed the border and didn't realize it????
Anyway, we took our new stock of food back to the drop yard and sat and waited. Not much on TV, so we watched a movie, then I tinkered around on the truck, added oil, cleaned, checked, etc. An in depth "preflight".
We finally got a dispatch about 1:30 and made it out of there about 2pm. We are now headed to Winston-Salem North Carolina. This is a 2366mi run. I had commented to Kim I would like a cross country run to Florida. Well, it almost came true!
It was my time of day to drive, so I drove till midnight, making it to our dropyard in El Paso, Tx. Kim got a couple of hrs sleep enroute, then we shut down till about 5am this morning. We needed fuel at El Paso which is just up the road from the drop yard, so I got us there and fueled,(what a good teammate, huh?) then Kim took the reins and I went back to sleep for awhile.
We are starting to get the hang of this I think. We are managing to get 3-4hrs sleep on the road, then shut down for 4-5hrs and sleep with the truck parked. The dispatches are allowing us todo this with time, or we are just managing better. This load is due in at 7:30 Monday morning, and as of right now, the GPS gives us an arrival time of 9:12am tomorrow (Sunday), so you can see, we have some time we can use enroute.
Weather has been great down here, 60's during day, 30's at nite. Have just been reading about all the weather in Chicago and the Illinois area, and the storm in the Northwest. Boy, have we been lucky so far this year year. (knock the wooded head). We have had some weather to deal with, but not too bad. We heard about a fellow team we know that got blown over in Rawlins, Wy earlier this week. She was driving, and the roads were bad with blowing snow. They had slowed to about 30mph, then the tractor got blown over, leaving the trailer upright. From his story, they went air born, and came to rest next to a cliff. If they had been going any faster, they would probably have been over the cliff. Someone was watching over them.
For all the truckers out there that might be reading this for whatever reason, please keep it safe out there, especially this time of year! For all you "4 wheelers", that goes out to you as well, we all share the road! :)
Till next time, Keep it safe out there