2 RV's to Fremont CA (delivered)

... spending the night at Livermore CA

No alarm. We are two hours time difference and we aren't going to pull out until 8:30 local.

Breakfast, eggs, sausage ... and a piece of French toast. They had time cut in strips and I took one strip with syrup. And as usual I put my glass of juice on my plate ... not realizing that the syrup would form a pool around my glass ... until I tried to take my glass off the plate and left a trail across the table. And somehow with the suction from picking up my glass I ended up with syrup on my glasses.

By the time we pull out at 8:30 there is not much for traffic, for CA. There is still enough to slow us down in a few places and it takes an extra half hour to get to Fremont.

1st stop - Shell in Fremont. When we pulled in I was wondering what was wrong with this place. 32 pumps and no one there. A few minutes later every pump was full, mostly with Amazon trucks and so was every parking spot. It must have been breaktime.

:( I got to the station with a range of 120 miles. That is 10 gallons. I need to leave some, I'm not going to arrive on 'E,' but that is a little much at $6 a gallon. And at $6 a gallon I only put in about three gallons, not likely enough to get the low fuel light to go off it I had come in on 'E.'

After that we stashed one RV at a mall area and headed a few miles down the road to get our rental car. As I am coming back I go past the place where we dropped our rental RV's a year or so ago. No wonder this area looked familiar.

2nd stop - the drop. I get there at 12 noon and they are gone to lunch. We get to wait.

BB picked up the rental car and then drove to the mall and switched out for her RV. When she gets to the drop she realizes she has left her paperwork in the rental car and starts walking back to get her paperwork. Half way across the lot she yells back to me ... I might as well bring the car too ... not just the paperwork. ??? yeah ???

Between their lunch and the time it took to inspect, we were there for two hours. There was one other driver that dropped and was gone before they even started on mine. Somehow they did BB's 1st. I did talk to that driver outside but once inside he never said a word to us even when he walked away from where we both were sitting.

Just before we left there was another driver with our company that arrived and he was in a rush to catch a plane. We didn't talk to him or offer him a ride.

I did talk to one of the sales people a little. When I got there a customer wanted to look inside and this sales person said no way. It has not been inspected yet. But later some people were looking in BB's RV and they said sales had told them to 'just go ahead and look at them.' ??? Maybe ??? BB usually doesn't say much but she said it was not the dealers RV until the dealer signs for it (and BB hadn't given them permission to be in it)

... when I was talking to the sales person, they said a lot of people had ordered these small RV's when there was not any in stock. Now a year later they are available for $20,000 more than they had agreed to. So some are backing out (maybe because of the economy?) I asked how far behind the shipper was and they wouldn't say. But they said they were behind ... and I said good, then I will have a job for a while.

When we are done, we need to get release numbers. Now we have a new program that will only allow us to get those numbers while we are at the GPS address of the drop. BB has been getting release numbers a different way for years but this is new ... and doesn't work. So I have to call dispatch. They insist it is supposed to work, I have no idea what they are talking about because I have never seen it. The company claims to be going paperless but with this shipper we still get a dozen sheets of paper at pick up. BB's not happy, I'm not happy. I'm just trying to stay civil enough that they do not fire me. Before when I was using programs that didn't work it was because that was my job. Test programs. Now I need to do it for free and no one is interested in correcting what is wrong.

They do give us release numbers and we will likely call in for them until they won't give us trips. We'll see. When we used to go to the companies safety meetings, we were the young people. This non-working technology is going to thin the hurd.

Next up, I call the local dispatcher but it goes to voicemail.

It is now 2 PM local and we have not eaten yet. We had the half mile to In-n-Out Burgers. I do reach dispatch and he says call back in a half hour. After we are done eating I call back, this time he says he will call me when he knows something.

We decide to drive up to Livermore, we will be heading that direction anyway. We drive past the shipper and there are 100's of buses that are done/almost done. But most are going to be local, short trips. We then head to the outlet mall where we hang out waiting for work.

Finally after two hours of waiting I call the dispatcher back. He had forgotten about me. He already has too many people in hotels and isn't going to pay for anyone else to sit for the weekend.

... and waiting for him, we forgot that the other west coast dispatch was closing also. We had been looking at doing some local work but were delayed two hours at the drop and then this dispatch didn't give us a strait answer until too late. Now we aren't going to try to do any of their trips this time.

Instead we will watch to see what shows up tomorrow leaving the area and call the bus dispatcher in the evening.

We ate too late today, so for evening food we each had a breakfast bar.

BB was trying to figure out where else we could get a car so we do not need to back track on Saturday AM. What she did find was that our route/trip had gone down $100 since she booked it so she rebooked one and canceled the other one.

Load board

US - 317

IA - 118

If the dispatcher had agreed to pay for our hotels and have us wait, we would have been money ahead waiting. Now we are having to pay our own hotels and we are going to make close to our 'minimum' daily pay. But once we were on our way I was 'talking' to two different drivers who warned me this was going to happen. And it does, once or twice a year.