Grain Truck

Today I made my first trip to town in the grain truck and oh was it a doozy of a first trip. Yes I’ve ridden in the semi with Matt to town but I had never driven until today.

I drove and Matt rode shot gun since this was my first time in the truck, which is not ours, among other reasons such as the fact that I didn’t want to be driving the truck in the first place.

To start from the beginning the whole topic of me driving the truck started Monday when he called me and asked if I was going to be close to a truck dealer to look at some trucks. (I wasn’t, wohoo.) Tuesday also included an inquisition about driving a grain truck, as well as Wednesday. I was out of town on Thursday so I escaped the question that day. This brings up to today and the dreaded question about driving a grain truck.

Up until today I had been really good at changing the subject or just not acknowledging the question in the first place. Today started with “just going and looking at the trucks” haha just look yeah right. I refused to give an answer and changed the subject about 100 times. We jumped back in the car and that is where Matt held me hostage. He told me he wasn’t stopping the car until I made a decision about which one of three trucks I was going to choose to drive.

So if you have caught this it has changed from will you drive a grain truck to which one are you going to drive in the span of five days.

We made it to a town 20 minutes away before I committed to even picking a truck. (Needless to say whatever patience Matt was attempting to have was quickly wearing thin and my shoes were about worn out from me dragging my feet on the subject. Hehe.) Back home we went to grab a quick bite to eat for lunch and then back down to the landlord’s shop to get said truck started and back up to our house. Just getting it started was a problem because the batteries were dead and then when he got it out of the shed it was over to the hose to wash all the dirt off of it from sitting for at least a year.

The truck in question is an automatic (yes automatic not a stick) twin screw with an 18 foot bed with a PTO hydraulic lift. (The fact that it is an automatic leads into another story that I’ll pass on for now.) But I digress, so we get said truck home and Matt unloads the last of the wheat from the combine into the truck and me now down to severely raw feet, since by this time I had drug my feet so much on doing this I had ruined my shoes and socks, get into the driver’s seat.

Matt says from the passenger seat just back over those chemical boxes and jugs (they were empty) it won’t hurt anything. So back over the chemical boxes and jugs I go and to the end of the driveway we head. Getting to the end of the driveway was a feet in and of its self because I kept stepping on the breaks and hitting them just hard enough to jerk us forward in our seats. Matt of course is having a hay day with this.

Out on the highway we go and not even two miles south of the house we get flagged down by an escort truck. He tells me there are TWO 16 foot wide loads coming through! We live on a two lane highway with no real shoulders and I’m driving a twin screw truck for the first time!! So I pull over on the little bit of a shoulder there is at a corner and wait for the first semi to make its way through. All the while Matt is saying don’t get over so far. Then the semi comes around the corner and Matt starts saying maybe you should get over a little further. I don’t move the truck.

We decide that we are going to continue on down the highway until we see the next set of escorts for the second semi. We ended up making it a couple more miles down the highway to a gravel road intersection on a curve that allowed me to completely pull of the highway and wait for everyone to go by on the highway. Whew. While we were waiting for the second semi the conversation consisted of Matt telling me in the last 14 years of driving the trucks and semis to town he has never had to pull over to allow a wide load to go through, let alone two wide loads within in a couple miles of each other!!

Really!!! This is not my idea of a fun trip in the first place and this event is not changing my opinion in the slightest.

Big sigh, and off we go again. I make it to town (finally) and snake through town to the south end to the elevator. And to great us is a line of semis waiting to go across the scale. Ugh, now there are witnesses at the elevator to my domed trip! We fairly quickly make our way up to the scale and then to the probe (where the elevator staff take samples out of the trucks to determine the quality of the grain) and the dreaded vacuum for the truck slips (as Matt’s analogy went, if you’ve used the vacuum they have at the bank you can use this one). The truck slips are what you use to identify your grain, the seller, share and who delivered the grain. It is also the first time you have to get out of your truck, so now everyone knows I’m driving!

I make it through this and head off to wait in line to dump. Remember I said this was a hoist truck which means the bed of the truck lifts from the front in order to use gravity to help clean out the flat bed of the truck. So the next thought that runs through my mind is I’m going to hit the roof of the pit or I’m going to tear the bed off the truck.

I enter the dump, raise the bed (just missing the roof) dump the wheat, put down the bed and head off to the outbound scale. Hugh sigh of relieve exhaled at this point.

I stopped on the outbound scale and snagged the printed ticket for the load. All 87 bushels of wheat dumped. (I know such a huge load right!!!)
Then off to home we go, snaking through town and I’m sure making a few people mad while dodging for cover. We parked the truck back in the shed where we got it from and jump in the car to head to the house.

Then as we are pulling into our driveway with the car we see one of those used chemical boxes lying next to the driveway. You remember towards the first of this little trip he told me to back over said boxes that it would be okay. Now one is laying at the end of the driveway because I must have got it caught in the axle when I backed over them.

I’m sighing and shaking my head as Matt again says I’ve never backed over a chemical box and drug it around with a truck.

To that I think, I’m glad you have never done that but I’m more than willing to use this as another valid point as to why I should not be driving a grain truck.

Matt is right about one thing this will be one trip to and from town I will not be forgetting any time soon.

And here is everyone else’s fair warning.

You see the truck pictured here this fall and you had better get out of the way!

Later,
Stephanie
The Moderately Involved Kansas Farm Wife