Kearny, NJ

Wow, only 3AM and tonight has already had enough suckage for one day. I woke up and felt sick to my stomach from the Burger King meal I had for lunch, which seems to have set the tone for the day. I decided against eating there again, so I hit the road. I hopped on the Turnpike and looked for exit 16E, as my directions said. There's a problem, though! There is no exit 16E when you're going south. It turns out I needed exit 17, not that I had any way of knowing that. So I passed it, but the next exit was 15X. It said it went to the roads I needed, so I took it anyway... but there were no signs at the exit showing me which way to go and, after fifteen minutes looking for somewhere to turn around, I just went back to the turnpike. Once I found exit 16E while going north, I just hopped off and started looking for the other roads. I still struggled to find things, though. I took the route the directions said I needed; I instead needed to take a fork that led directly to the next route I had to follow. So, again, I was left driving around and searching desperately for somewhere to turn around or for the route I should have been on. Once I finally ended up on the right road, road construction forced me to make some very... interesting maneuvers, including a button hook turn that I probably would have needed four lanes to make; I instead bumped a construction barrel. Long story short: what should have been a three mile, five minute drive instead took 23 miles and an hour and a quarter. Definitely not a good start to the night.

Things only improved marginally after I picked up the load. Dropping the trailer and picking up the new one went smoothly, but once I left, I once again got turned around repeatedly. As such, the seven mile trip to this drop yard cost me 12 miles. For anyone keeping track, I've driven 35 miles and gotten paid for 10; I don't think operations would be terribly happy seeing 250% out of route miles. I dropped the relay load, then hooked up to the relay I'm picking up, heading back into North Carolina. I just need to finish updating my logbook and drive out of here; I've done all the inspection work on the trailer and typed this while I was waiting for the air tanks to pressurize. Given all the crap that's happened so far tonight, I really don't feel like doing any more work; I'd rather just get back to sleep. But I have 550 miles on this run and I have to deliver it by 2AM tomorrow (less than 22 hours from now), so I have to make at least a few miles tonight. I might just stop in Carlisle, PA but I'll make that choice once I get there.