This is not a picture that you should be taking from a big rig.

13'6" does clear these bridges if you are loaded heavy and aim for the high portion of the bridge. You can also let the air out of the air bags to help.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Garmin

It’s Tuesday and we are waiting in Pennsylvania waiting to unload. It was a very hard day yesterday. We had gone to North Carolina to delivery a load from Laredo, Texas and we waited at a Wal-Mart with 3 other CFI trucks. On Sunday we got a load to pick up Monday morning at Campbell’s Soup and take to PA. It turned out to be the trip from hell. I didn’t do my trip planning instead relied on my Garmin that has been pretty good to get me there. It routed me through Washington D.C. on a non-truck route down town. Needless to say I was the only truck. I knew that I was in for a bad day. Then I got to underpasses that gave a 13’6” clearance that stated NO TRUCKS in big yellow signs. Did I fail to mention this was during rush hour? (We did see the Washington Monument and the Capital Building from an 18 wheeler.) I took the lane under the low clearance bridges that had the most clearance, slowed already slow traffic changing lanes. Then I got on the expressway (NO TRUCKS ALLOWED) and made it to I-95 north to Baltimore, MD to enjoy rush hour in Baltimore. Things didn’t improve. A flat bed hit a low underpass and closed the interstate. We were stopped for hours. Of course it could have been us pissing off a whole lot of people in DC rush hour but we lucked out big time. We got rerouted through a small town that was hilly with difficult turns. Some guy took it upon himself to take it out on me. I was stopped on a steep hill blocking the drive to a store that he wanted in so he gets out of his truck and tells me to move so that he can get in. I won’t repeat what I told him but he got on his cell phone to call the police. I am sure that didn’t go well for him. They were all busy trying to get thousand of cars and trucks through their town. The turns reminded me of the drive we did in CFI boot camp down town but we had all the traffic from a busy interstate and on steep hills thrown in for good measure. Of course no truck stops parking spaces were available anywhere. The rest area was so crowded that they had an accident in it also. We found a place to park for the night in a vacant parking lot in York, PA. We made our delivery and now we are headed to Missouri. We saw a truck on it’s side but it was on the other side backing them up for a change.