Here’s my contribution to the North American diary series…
This trip stars out quite late on Sunday, the previous evening was spent drinking my own body weight in Budweiser to celebrate my Wife’s birthday, so sobering up was the first priority.
I had been quite busy before the party, as you can see
I did the baking and the cutting into shape, KR79 applied the sprinkles and nianiamh did most of the eating.
The morning was spent nursing an almighty hangover, I eventually summoned enough energy to drag my arse off the sofa and into the kitchen to prepare some meals to take along with me. I’m sick of the slop they serve in the truckstops over here, it has no nutritional value and makes my wallet smaller and my belly bigger, so I make stuff to take with me. Then it was off to the yard, my ride was looking a little battle scarred after the previous trip, I did consider giving her a rinse off, but the late hour and the weather forecast changed my mind.
I hooked up to a rental trailer and left the yard, destination Vancouver, British Columbia, almost 1500miles away and I was due there at 3pm their time (5pm my time) on Tuesday.
I needed to get four or five hours done today so that I could make it on time. I had decided on getting as far as Moosomin, Saskatchewan where there’s a decent parking area at the Co-Op services and that’s exactly what I did. 392kms in 4hours driving. I pulled in at the stroke of midnight, shut her down, fired up the night heater and dragged my hungover body into my pit for a well deserved rest.
After 9hrs in bed I woke up nice and refreshed and after making a brew and a bowl of Frosties, went inside the service station for a nice free shower. I came out, did a walkaround and oil and coolant level check and fired up the mighty CAT for the day’s work ahead.
Next stop was Moose Jaw, about 2.75hrs down the road. This was where Al Capone stored his illicit liquor during prohibition and there are a load of tunnels that he used to escape the clutches of the law, they’re a tourist attraction now, although it beats me why anyone would be doing the tourist thing in this part of the world, driving through Saskatchewan is boring with a capital B. I had to take on some liquid of my own here, 361 was in need of some motion lotion, so I pulled into the newly refurbished Flying J truckstop and sucked up 1000ltrs into her tanks. After fuelling I pulled outside to have a spot of lunch. Korean BBQ Chicken with noodles and stir fry.
I still had a lot to do today, so I set off again, stopping for a quick 15min break in Brooks, Alberta, a further 4.5hrs down the road. It had got dark by now, thankfully as heading west the setting sun is a real PITA. I have McGyver’ed a solution to this, as you can see, but a slightly larger visor would be much better and make the truck look even better too, I have requested one, but my pleas have fallen on deaf ears so far.
Another 4.75hrs driving saw me reach my destination for the night, Golden, British Columbia. 1240kms for the day in 12hrs driving, the first 10hrs were all on the barren flat lands of the Prairies, the last two were in the stunning scenery of the Rockies, but it was dark and snowing, so this was all I could see.
I took an 8hr break in Golden, we can do this every other day in Canada, the missing two hours has to be made up, but it’s a lot less complicated than the EU regs, I just have to have two hours off duty during that day, the previous day, or the following day. The plan is to have mine today so that I start with a fresh log book the following day. Even after only 8hrs off, it’s not a bad place to start the day from as it happens, this is the view that greets me when I open the curtains.
The vast majority of today is spent running through the mountains, the weather wasn’t great at times, I’ll let the pictures tell the story.
After 5.5hrs of this the weather cleared up a bit and turned to rain as I joined the Coquihalla Highway, I stopped for some lunch at a brake check area.
Here you have to pull in and check that your brakes are working properly and are in adjustment, personally I don’t use my brakes in the mountains, I use the Jake Brake and go slow enough that I have to back off of that, rather than going fast enough that I have to use the brakes to bring my speed down to avoid over revving the engine, my theory is that you can go too slow a million times, but you’ll only go too fast once……
From there I did the final couple of hours back down to sea level and reached Vancouver.
The rain had given me a free truckwash and 361 was looking half decent again as I pulled into the customer and dropped my trailer.
I swapped the rental reefer for one of our old box vans and dropped that at my reload just around the corner. The trailer wasn’t loaded until midnight local time, so I booked off for the day with 715kms done in 8.75hrs driving time and 5hrs paid waiting time. My home for the night was another Flying J truckstop, this one on Annacis Island, BC.
Wedsnesday morning and it’s time to turn around and head for home, I hooked up to my trailer, did my pretrip checks and headed off into the rising sun, quite a rare occurrence for me to be starting that early!
The rush hour commute had already started, I was going against the flow, but still had to contend with the must be in front of the truck at all costs brigade. I know it’s not big and it’s not clever, but I do enjoy putting my right boot to the floor and stopping idiots from passing me and then pulling in front on the brakes to take the next turning.
The weather was a little better today as I made my way from the coast into the mountains, this is just before I stopped for fuel at the Flying J truckstop in Chilliwack.
Unfortunately that was about to change, as you can see, the higher I get, the clouds start to appear.
The snow hasn’t reached this part of the world yet, although when it does it does it in style, the bits you can see where tere are no trees are where there’s been an avalanche last winter. Sometimes the avalanches are man made too. When the snow build is so bad that an avalanche is imminent the lacal council send out a couple of blokes with a huge cannon and they fire rocket shells at the snow and create an avalanche so they can deal with it on their terms.
The tunnel you see in the distance is a snow shed, this is a known avalanche area, so they cover the road so that they don’t have to clear millions of cubic feet of snow from the highway. The hill is a bit steep here too, my Peterbilt has a big 15ltr twin turbo CAT under the hood, I’m only loaded to 35tons and I drop down to 5th low in the 18speed box as I get out of the other side of the tunnel. (it’s a 16spd really, but because the Americans are obsessed with numbers they count the two crawler gears too)
The Volvo wasn’t even in the last picture, but I soon reel him in a few hundred yards after the tunnel, he was a speck in the mirrors in no time thanks to the big yellow lump.
The weather took a turn for the worse at the top of the hill, a taste of things to come…
Half an hour down the road and I could’ve been on another planet.
I was hungry after all that snow, so with 4hrs driving done that day, I pulled into the Flying J at Kamloops and made myself a Chicken Curry, I had made a few portions of this, it’s like a proper take away chinky curry, but I add a load of Habeneros to spice it up a little. The Habenero is a peculiar thing, like sweetcorn in some ways, except that it’s consitency changes in the body, but it doesn’t lose any of its heat as it passes through, I stick some wet wipes in the fridge, to counter this side effect.
The next few hours roll by with the awesome views of BC, I actually get paid to see this stuff, days like this make all the crap that goes with the job worth it.
I passed taffytrucker just after I took the last photo, never managed to get a snap of him though, but he is real. From there on BC did what it’s very good at doing at this time of year, making a nice drive a bloody nightmare, here comes the white stuff again.
Then it started to get dark, the roads were ok though, I was still horsing along nicely….until I went around a corner and started to climb the last hill in BC, the locals call it Field Hill, I now refer to in terms that you won’t find in any Bible!
I got about a quarter of the way up and started to wheelspin, I grabbed a couple of gears as I lost momentum, but it was no good, I came to a halt. ■■■■■■■■, time for me to get the chains out. So I put the brakes on and jumped out, only to watch my lorry slide backwards and jackknife down the hill! It didn’t go far, but trust me, standing on a mountain in a blizzard and seeing your truck slide away is not a nice experience.
So now, not only was I stuck on a hill, my truck was now at all kinds of funny angles, the trailer was sticking out into the road, the back of the unit was off the shoulder and into the dirt at the side of the road and the front was pointing hard left, another foot further and the cab would have hit the trailer, this was going to be a lot of fun……
I managed to get the tyre chains on, not an easy task when half the wheels are under the trailer, but even then I was still sliding further off the road, the only way out was backwards. Luckily there was no traffic, everyone else had spun out too, so it was safe to reverse out, safe, but not easy, the angle I was at meant that I was going to go off the paved road if I went back as I was, so I pulled my trailer brake and just let her have it, hoping to get the unit and trailer in a straight line, it worked too, so far so good. Now I had to get back onto the road itself, so I slowly started to roll backwards, but every time I touched the brakes the front wheels locked and slid to the right, this was pushing the trailer further onto the shoulder and in the opposite direction I wanted it to go.
It took me about an hour, but finally I got back onto the road. Then a fire and rescue 4x4 turned up and asked me how I was doing, I replied that I had had better days! They advised me to stay put until the morning as the road was going to be closed until then, but I could carry on if I wanted, by now it was a challenge, no way was I going to let this poxy hill beat me, so I started climbing the hill, listening to the reassuring clinking of the snow chains, I made it about a hundred yards when the first snow chain got spat off. I had no bungees to keep them tight, so I stopped, walked back down the hill and dragged the chain back up, reattached it and started again, I repeated this process a number of times and fell on my arse twice during the process.
I finally managed to keep the chains from flying off by keeping to 10km/h, so the 20kms to level ground took me two hours, plus the couple of hours I spent poncing around on the hill made this the hardest work I’ve done in a long time.
I made it as far as the outskirts of Calgary and shut down for the night, 1005kms done in an unmentionable number of hours.
This was what greeted me the next morning.
I saw fly sheet in Calgary, we were yapping on the phone as we passed, so I never managed to get a shot of him either. The weather cleared a bit and I stopped at Brooks, Alberta again to tip and reload my body.
Found this reading material in the karzi, there’s some serious nutjobs around and their grammar is bloody awful.
Back out on the road in the prairies, boring they may be, but no chains are required.
I never bothered stopping again until Brandon, Manitoba, then I was faced with a road closure, trucks were lined up everywhere, so I decided not to bother waiting, I would go to bed and deal with it the next day, but as I pulled onto the side road the CB came alive, the road was open again, I ended up bypassing all the trucks queued up on the main drag, although I never meant too.
I parked for the night outside my delivery, it took a big day, 1344kms in 13hrs driving, but even with all the dramas, I still made my booking time.
