A Mile High

Ok, so my first night sleeping in a truck wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t overly restful, either. The first 6 hours or so were spent in a truck stop in Richfield, UT. At about 4:30 local time, Mike got up and started driving, which meant I had to move to the bottom bunk (it’s against the rules to sleep on the top bunk while the vehicle is in motion).

I was only able to get about an hour more sleep after that, and spent the rest of my down-time watching shows on the laptop, and sitting in the passenger seat till we cot to a little town in Colorado called Cameo (see below), where I moved into the driver seat and finished the drive to Denver.

I’ve always heard that Parley’s Canyon on I-80 between Salt Lake City and Park City is really hard to drive in a truck. We only drove it once in school, and mostly just to give us an idea of what we could expect from a pretty steep grade. After driving I-70 through the mountains of Colorado – both directions, eastbound with a “light load” of about 22,000 lbs, and west bond with a heavy load of 44,000 lbs – I have no fear of Parley’s Canyon. Parley’s is a short, nearly straight-shot. I-70 through CO is a winding twisting stretch of hell that somehow escaped the netherworld and inflicted itself upon the world, lying across the Continental Divide.

Advice to any other truckers who need to take that route: Don’t miss your gears.

So, as you may have gathered from the context of the above, we dropped our load in Denver and picked up a new one… and as you may have also guessed from the fact that we had to pass back the way we had come, our new load is westbound. Indeed, we’re headed back to the lovely state of California. However, we were only able to make it as far as Cameo (where we had breakfast and changed drivers yesterday). It was about 11:15 PM when we pulled in, which was just in time since (as a driver in training, Werner won’t let me drive after midnight local time, until I’ve been out for 14 days).

I got about the same amount of sleep last night as the night before, which is regretful, since I like getting 7-8 hours, not 6… but it should be ok. Most of my driving today should be in daylight. We’ll probably switch places in Richfield since it’s about 2 hours away, and I’m not legal to drive again for another 1.5 hours.

It snowed in Utah, last night. The roads are ugly, but don’t seem to be causing us any real trouble, at this point. Hopefully that doesn’t change. I really don’t want to chain up.

Now we just drove into a fog bank. Oh, come on, now, weather! Be nice!