I've been running a strange little trip the last couple of days. Well, strange for me. It's a intermodal run. Basically, that means a container that goes on ships, trains, or a chassis with wheels. We've all seen them, so I'm not going to go on a major boring description.
The problem I'm running into is a little weird. I haven't been driving mountains or major hills in this truck before. I don't really know how any truck handles certain terrain until I'm there. Then, I don't know how to get the most out of it until I experiment a bit.
It's like trying to push a gazillion tons of bricks up a mountain with a bicycle. Mixed metaphors, but it gets the point across. As soon as it looks at an incline the damn thing starts slowing down. Then, it keeps slowing down until I'm crawling. The bitch of it is that I'm not even hauling a heavy load.
I've tried everything I can think of to maintain a decent climbing speed; changing the transmission from automatic to manual, setting the cruise, not setting the cruise, praying, ...
A run that should have taken a couple days is going to run into 3 days. Fortunately, I can make the deadline for delivery, but it's frustrating the heck out of me. Mountain driving in a gutless wonder sucks!
Thanks for being here,
Renae - The Truck Driving Woman
Teeny Tiny update...Made the load on time and tried to pick up an empty trailer to head west. Marker lights on the back don't work. DOT says, "You can have as many lights as you want, but they all must work." Nobody to fix it. Now they have a different load for me to run and I've got to wait for my clock to come back and a different trailer. Ugh!
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