Hopefully We Won't Have Many Days Like This

Our week began last Sunday morning when we arrived at our Lakewood, WA terminal to pick up our truck and trailer to head out after our Thanksgiving hometime. I looked up and saw a helicopter that seemed to be intentionally hovering over our position and thought that was strange. About that time another driver walked up to us and told us that four policemen had been shot and killed just a few blocks over from our terminal and that there were police everywhere. When we picked up our trailer Shannon made sure to check that we weren't transporting any unwanted passengers before we left. Our prayers are with the families of those slain officers. Obviously satan is alive and well on planet earth.

We picked up our paper load in Longview, WA on Sunday afternoon and began our trip to deliver it in Pomona, CA, which we did at 8am on Tue morning. As we made our way to our Santa Fe Spring terminal one of our trailer tires blew. It sounded like a gunshot, it was so loud. Shannon pulled over to the shoulder and a Honda Accord followed us to the side. The young Mexican man who got out of the car said a piece of the tread hit the front of his car. Shannon looked at it and it was hard to tell if there was damage there from before versus what the tread could have done. We went ahead and called the police and the tire service our company uses in Los Angeles to get the tire replaced. The policeman who showed up was not happy with the Mexican man and hassled him about having too dark of window tinting and a few other things the guy had done to his car. The policeman's report won't be ready for a couple of weeks but I doubt that it will note much damage. Our company considers a blown tire an unavoidable incident so it shouldn't go against our driving record but it's still kind of a bummer to have a claim against our truck. Oh, well, I guess that's trucking.

Three hours after the tire blew, we were once again on the road to our terminal when we smelled antifreeze and the temperature gauge read higher than usual. Shannon called the shop and they said take the truck on in to our La Mirada shop, which we did. That night we left the shop with a new radiator, two new drive tire fenders and a new fender spot mirror and our new trip assignment to Pennsylvania. People ask us if we'd ever consider owning our own rig and after a day like we had that day where we needed a new tire, and the new items for the truck, which would all come out of own pocket if we were owner-operators, not to mention the cost of having the tire service call made to us on a freeway and the labor costs involved with the radiator replacement, we both agree that having a company like Watkins-Shepard backing us up is the best way to go!