Jenny helped him tuck the cable underneath the edge of the headliner and bring it down the window frame and under the dash, leaving no unsightly cable hanging down the middle of the windshield. She was a great help because of her small size and agility.
It was a Bluetooth model dashcam, so Jenny installed the app on her phone and got it set up. It recorded continuously on a loop that could be set to six, eight or ten hours depending on the size of the microchip. Hugh had purchased a 64gb chip, and a 32gb second one, so he put in the larger chip and chose the ten-hour loop setting.
Important to Hugh, it had a feature that if a major event occurred it would save the event along with thirty seconds before the event and two minutes afterward, and not record over it.
It also had a built-in GPS feature that recorded road speed and G forces on three axes. It recorded those on the same continuous loop with the camera.
Hugh navigated out of Las Vegas. Past Hoover Dam, it was a straight shot down 93 to Kingman, Arizona, a jog over on I-40 east, then 93 again going south all the way to Wickenburg.
A lot of 93 south from I-40 was four-lane highway, but much of it was two lanes. County planners had decided that intersections on the approach to Wickenburg, and the one major intersection in town, should be roundabouts.
The problem is American drivers do not like roundabouts and are not comfortable using them. Place a seventy-five-foot-long truck and semi-trailer into the mix in a too-small roundabout and there’s bound to be trouble. Hugh’s experience on these particular roundabouts is it was impossible for him to get through them without taking up all the lanes, and sometimes even part of the truck apron around the circumference of the center circle of the roundabout.
These Wickenburg roundabouts had seen some notable accidents – confrontations between trucks that needed the extra space to make the turns, and cars not willing to grant them that space. Hugh had personally witnessed just that kind of incident.
South of Wickenburg, at one of the roundabouts, Highway 93 ended and Hugh picked up Highway 60, which had come in from the west.
Then it was Highway 60 all the way to Interstate 10 in Phoenix via the new Interstate 303 bypass.
They had left the truck stop north of Las Vegas around mid-morning, so it was early afternoon as they were approaching Phoenix.
“This 303 bypass is an incredible time-saver,” Hugh said. He was taking a right off of Highway 60 onto the on-ramp for the 303 in the northwest corner of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.
“Before this went in it could take an extra hour to get onto the 10, depending on time of day and traffic. Now, we’ll take the 303 around the city and dump out onto the 10 without any stop signs or traffic lights.”
On Interstate 10 Hugh drove east until it turned into the Interstate 202 Loop on the other side of the tunnel. The Boeing plant where they were delivering was off of the portion of 202 called the Red Mountain Freeway.
The Boeing manufacturing complex was huge, consisting of numerous large buildings and other operations spread out over two-hundred and fifty acres in north Mesa. Hugh had to search on his phone’s map app in satellite view to locate shipping and receiving. His pre-load order had instructions as well, but Hugh believed in redundancy when it came to piloting his rig in unfamiliar locations.
It turned out his delivery was at the northwest corner of the largest square-shaped building in the compound. He had made it in plenty of time. It was about a half-hour before his 4 p.m. scheduled delivery.
He parked, and walked through the doorway labeled “Receiving” to get his door assignment.
Walking back to the truck he could see Apache helicopters lined up on the tarmac north of where he was parked. What beautiful birds.
“They’re ready for us. We’ve got a door,” Hugh told Jenny as he climbed back into the driver’s seat.
He got set up for making the back, remembering to get out and open the trailer’s big double doors before backing up to the dock.
When he returned to the truck’s cab he said, “I wish I could say that forgetting to do that was purely a rookie’s mistake. But even old hands like me forget it on the rare occasion.”
He bumped the dock, pulled the air brakes, and got out and chocked two of the trailer tires, one on each side of the trailer.
As he was climbing back into the truck to wait to be unloaded he heard the chirp indicating a message coming across his Qualcomm.
“I hope that’s a pre-load out of here,” he said.
“Yep. We’ve got a pickup first thing tomorrow morning at PepsiCo in Tolleson on the west of Phoenix with a load for the big Costco DC in Tracy, California. We’ll deadhead over to the Tolleson truck stop that’s off of I-10 to spend the night.”
“Whew. Right away,” Jenny said.
“That’s the life of a trucker. We have to get the miles because we don’t get paid for sitting still.”
“OK, girls. Let’s get a move on.” Joe was nervous. This was the big day, and he wanted to get it over with.
He was at the mother’s house. The mother’s car was parked next to her house in her narrow driveway, and Joe had pulled in off the street and had parked behind her car. The mother lived in a neighborhood older than the one Joe lived in. Her single-wide driveway was hemmed in on both sides by sizeable
