And The New Year Begins

Let me start by telling you about our Christmas vacation.  We took our daughter, Robyn, and our grandson, Caleb, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for a very "down-home" country Christmas in a log cabin in the Smokies.  Ron's sister, Donna, joined us from Holiday, Florida.  We had a wonderful, joyous, wet time.  It rained every day and was damp and cold.  But we had the best time.  Donna is already planning for next Christmas.  We visited Dollywood on the only day that didn't rain.  It was very chilly but no wind or rain while we were there.  What a blessing to get away for a while to celebrate Christ's birth and spend a week with family.

Now, on to the new year.  We started by having Directv installed in our home so that we could have the satellite tv in our truck.  On January 3 we drove to Mansfield to pick up our brand new 2013 truck from the owner.  While we were in Ohio we took the truck to have the Quallcomm installed.  This is a computer that FedEx uses for our communications while on the road.  It also is our electronic log so we no longer have to fill out paper log books.  The next morning it had to be taken for installation of the Ameriscanner.  This is the recording device for our temperature-controlled loads (pharmaceuticals, art loads, etc.).  This took longer than anticipated and resulted in a later appointment for the branding.  After the installation was completed the truck had to be taken to Akron for branding-the FedEx lettering on the doors and box.  While Ron took the truck to Akron I took the car and headed back home.  Ron arrived @ 3:30 a.m. on Saturday the 5th.  We had a marathon packing time and headed back to Green, Ohio on Sunday afternoon.  Monday noon on January 7 we were at the FedEx main office lot for a 2 1/2 day testing of the reefer to make sure it is able to maintain different temperature settings.  After this was finished on Wednesday we had to do a dry run for at least 8 hrs.  We were finally finished with all the testing by 10 p.m. Wednesday and able to start running again on Thursday morning.  During this first week in the new truck we drove almost until we dropped.  We went from Ohio to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to California to Texas and back to Arizona.  At this point I was almost out of driveable hours and we had to spend a couple days outside of Phoenix.  During all this time we had no TV, no dvd's, just radio.  But I'm saving that story for my next blog.   So, until next time . . . . . . . . .