From the beginning with the chaos of just trying to get it loaded, to not being able to get the unload done logically.
So to fill you in, Tuesday morning I wake up at 7am and call the broker looking for my confirmation of the load as we are in Yakima waiting to go to the first pick and get things started.
Guess what... yup still no sheet from the customer. Now I am not a happy camper but I am reassured that this is a good load and that the customer is still working out the details with the shipper and it shouldn't be long now.
So I get up and go into the restroom and walk Dozer. Then I check my email as this is the way things are done. Nope nothing yet.
I spend about an hour sitting, waiting, watching... then I go back to bed. Roughly every half hour I am checking my emails, still nothing. At 11am I call back, we hear that the second pick is cleared and that the first one is almost done and the confirmation should be done within 15 minutes.
By 11:30am we have our confirmation and we are heading to Wapato, WA which is down the road from Yakima, roughly 7 miles.
It is first come first serve so we get there and get checked in. There are no other trucks there but we are told to park and the forklift driver will come get us when they are ready. Ok, so we park and as we are doing this a truck pulls in beside us, he checks in and get put to the dock.
So much for first come first serve. Problem at this point is now another truck has pulled in and is parked beside us for roughly 30 minutes and then he too is put to the dock. Now I am getting miffed.
So I call up the shipper and I get the same guy I spoke with earlier that told me first come first serve, I informed him that we had been there for roughly 2 hours and three trucks had been pulled around us and we still weren't to the dock. I am put on hold for a few minutes and then he tells me that there is a problem, not all the product is there and we are going to have to go to another plant, in Yakima, to get the rest. Now the rest was 63 cases, truly amazing is about all I am thinking at this point.
So I get off the phone and call back to the broker and inform him of what I have just learned, he in turns calls the customer and then he calls me back to say no one was informed of this.
Now time is just getting away from us and we still have the Prosser pick that has a 5pm appointment but we are 3 hours from that pick up and it is around 1 pm now.
So they get us to the dock and at this point we learn that we have been waiting for the inspector to check the product before it can be loaded on us.
What a day!! So the product is inspected and put on the truck and we head over to the second pick, which went much quicker. In the mean time I have called the broker to find out the operating hours of the Prosser plant as time is getting tight. He makes a call over there and then calls me back, what I didn't ask him to do was change the appointment just to find out the hours. Turns out the hours were till 10 pm but then he tells me he changed our appointment to 8pm.
Why oh why do people jump the gun!! We arrived at the Prosser plant at 5:10pm and waited until 9:15pm to get backed to their dock to get loaded.
And now we are over gross and having to have some of the product cut because NO ONE seems to know how much their product weighs.
Truly an amazing start to this trip. We spent all day waiting to get loaded and then had to drive as far as we could to get the product delivered on time.
We had asked that they change the order of the delivery as the first one was going to Disputanta, VA and this is a good area for loading out of so we wanted this to be the second drop. But of course this wasn't to be. So we dropped there on Sunday morning and then drove 220 miles or so to Greencastle, PA for Monday morning delivery.
All the product was received in good order and we are very happy to be done with the night mare!!!.
I am also including a link, as soon as I get it uploaded, that has more photos from this past trip. The weather was really nice during the day and quite cool at night depending where we were even at freezing. made for nice sleeping, though while we were in Virginia and Pennsylvania at the truck stops it seemed that all the light weights were parked near us as they had to have their trucks running all night. Needless to say this really sucks when we like to have the windows open to enjoy the cool air.
I have spent many hours getting this link uploaded just so you can have more pictures to look at, hope everyone likes them.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=freedomasseen&target=ALBUM&id=5665258669812601889&authkey=Gv1sRgCJf2-o31h_yvhAE&feat=email
