 Morning people, morning truckin' lovers. We're here in Albany, Minnesota, and we're in the wrong place. Came here to pick up my load, I called my boss, and I'm like, hey, so what's the procedure here in Albany? Just dropped my trailer, grabbed the loaded, and where's the paperwork gonna be at? I just wanted to know what to do while I'm here, you know, so that I'm not running around like a chicken with his head cut off. And he's like, Albany? Like, yeah, Albany, I'm here in Albany, Minnesota. Nice town, kinda snowy. It's supposed to be in Rosemont, Minnesota. What? Rosemont, Minnesota is south of Minneapolis yet. That's like two hours away from here in good weather. Let's see Rosemont, Minnesota. Okay, that's where we're going. We're up here by St. Cloud. Oh no. I haven't wasted any time because I stopped for my 10 hour break in Sock Center, which was just down the road here, so I got as far as I could. I'm not like running further behind than I would've been, but there we go. We're gonna go all the way down here and pick up a load there. I'm glad I didn't unhook. I just parked. I'm here in the empty lineup. I was just gonna drop the trailer and I figured, yeah, I should figure out what's going on before I drop the trailer, right? Just in case I've been driving for long enough that you always double check before you do anything so that you don't have to do it twice. If I would've dropped the trailer then checked in, I would've had to re-hook on unnecessary labor in the winter, unnecessary labor. We avoid all unnecessary labor in winter time. All right, all right, here we go. I thought he said Minneapolis, but then when I got my paperwork, my paperwork said Albany. It's the same company, but two locations. So maybe they bill it to Albany, but we pick it up in Rosemont. I don't know what the situation is there, but either way, my load's not here. The wipers on this truck are the most terrible wipers for winter time. They should never be placed on a Canadian semi-truck, but for some reason here we are living the dream. They have all of the joints exposed so water and ice get in there and then they freeze and then they don't wipe properly, like that one. And 100 liters turn left on CR 156. So we thought we were gonna get home tonight yet. It'll be another night in the truck. I would have gone further yesterday then. Well, then again, it was pretty late 30 by the time I got going because I had to dig this truck out. The interstate, some wipers are terrible. If this was my truck, I would be stopping at the first truck stop to replace those. The first one, not the second one. They would have been replaced before I left, but I thought I was only gonna be in this truck for today and now it'll be today and tomorrow. Stop means stop. Look both ways, up, down, ready to go. What does that say? Warning, danger, no trespassing. Waste stabilization ponds, city of Albany. Interesting. Don't go in there. It's a big pool of poop. I just cleaned off that wiper too, you know? That's gonna bug me all day. I guess what I could do is do the cold windshield method. Get the windshield cold so that the snow just bounces off of it, but then when I do need my wipers, they don't work at all. At least now they work a little bit. I'm done with winter. I don't know about you guys, I'm done with it. Turn right on, gate straight south. See our 10 man van who will take the entrance to the right of 90 meters. You know, last time I came to Minnesota, I had a snowstorm also. I'm beginning to think Minnesota doesn't like me. I went into Minnesota, I like Minnesota. I'm 94 eastbound on the freeway. At least this wiper's working good. Like what happened to that one? I just cleaned it off. It's like it doesn't fit onto the windshield properly. I'm here to party. I think that's one of ours from Winnipeg. Yep, nope, no it's not. It looked like a J-truck. This, and I see traffic coming up that moved over for me. The polite thing to do, what I do is I don't match their speed and lock them in the left lane. I let them get in front of me and then if I wanna go faster than them, I pass them then. Look at these wipers, this is nuts. We're on the south side of Minneapolis, St. Paul right now. What is this? This is Minnesota 77 southbound. I thought that lane ended, that's why I went into this lane. Like we're still good to go. Under the speed limit, and he's in the center lane. That's a pet peeve of mine. Why are you in the center lane, bud? At least if you're gonna be in the center lane, at least do the speed limit, you know? 65 mile an hour, I can only do 60 and I'm passing you. That means you should probably move over to the right. Just a thought, I don't know, crazy thoughts, right? Crazy thoughts with Trucker Josh. Why is this guy braking now? Bud, I'm not even capable of doing the speed limit. I shouldn't be catching up to any of you right now. What are you, are you braking again? What are you braking for? Probably one of those two foot drivers, you know? Very often you can tell that people drive two feet because their brake lights come on for no reason, or they just stay on all the time because people rest their left foot on the brake. It's very bad for your car to do that. You should always only drive with one foot. Your left foot should only be used for the clutch if you're driving a manual. That's it, otherwise it's just your right foot. Little snow they have here though, eh? Like Minneapolis isn't that far away from Winnipeg and we have like six feet of snow. They've got like a dusting. And just in the bushes there just a little bit. Everywhere else is all melted. Must be nice. Got ourselves all tied down, loaded up or loaded up and tied down. Whatever order you want to do those in, I prefer to get loaded first and then tied down but that's just me. So we had this pre-loaded trailer here waiting for us. I wanted to quickly stop us here and I was corrected on how I tied down this load. So this load is on that T-frame right there in front of it. You see how it's resting on that? And that is designed to let the load flex just a little bit so that it doesn't crack. Now I was corrected on this. You want to tie this load down to the T-frame on the O-ring there. Right where that center chain is, you want all three chains to go through that eye hole there. You don't want to chain the front end down to the deck like that because that prevents the load from being able to twist and shift as the trailer twists. It's an aluminum trailer, it's supposed to flex. And you have to allow it to flex while not getting the concrete to flex because obviously the concrete is not supposed to flex and that's why we have that T-beam on there. So I was corrected on that and just for the future. So you know, this thing didn't crack, don't worry. It was perfectly fine, but for the future, if you haul a load like this, make sure you put your chains only through the eye holes there on that T-frame up front there and don't chain it down to the actual trailer itself in the front. In the back, yeah, chain it down to the trailer. You'll see it in just a second here. Just wanted to point that out. You can see how we're using this seesaw little thing here. That's what those are used for. Those are the tarps that were on the other trailer. I'm just taking them back for wherever they belong to. It's slightly, slightly over width. We're nine foot and a quarter. Trailer bed's about eight feet. So we're sticking over, it doesn't really look like it. We're sticking over about six inches on each side. Nothing really to write home about, but it's enough to make us need a permit. Permit and signs, flags. So there we go. Not too sure how far we're gonna get today yet, but we'll see what happens. So I've got you secured on my head. I've got this load secured on my trailer and secured on the truck. Chain down, ready to rock and roll. They told me to use five chains. So I used six. Better to be safe than sorry. Okay, Volvo. Think you got what it takes? I don't know, I'm not a fan of Volvo. I used to own one, well, not own one. Sorry, I used to lease one just like this. What are those things over there? Is the camera picked those up or are they too far away for the lens? What is that? Crazy. Weird. Okay, off we go. About 800 kilometers or 500 miles back to the yard. We're not gonna make it back today yet. It'll be tomorrow. I'm gonna go about 20 to 30 minutes. About 20 to 30 minutes down the road. I'm gonna hit a rest area or something. Might even wait. See if we can hit one before Minneapolis. We might have to wait till after. And then we're gonna go check our chains, check our load and see where we're at from there and try to plan out where we're gonna spend the night. And when was the last time we were in Minneapolis? It's been a little while, eh? We're here on the 494. We're headed west around the south side. Just turned off of, just merged off of, what was that, I-35W? I'm still always surprised that there's, this is a really big city. Such a big mega city. Within seven hours of Winnipeg. And like the city makes Winnipeg look like a little suburb. It makes it look like a small town. So many people. That guy up there forgot to turn his signal off and he's confusing all the traffic around him. Let's skip to the next morning here. We're in Rothsay, Minnesota. Drilling out, grabbed myself a breakfast sandwich. Gonna combine our days together here into one video because I'm getting a little bit behind in my videos. We're all set, all ready to go. If my brakes still release. Yikes. I've had this problem on this truck when I left too. The drives didn't wanna release the brakes. Yikes. They freeze to the drum. Okay, we're loose, let's go. So we still got that big old cement column or whatever that is behind us. Oh boy, and somebody parked all the way out here in the driveway overnight. Must've gotten full here last night. I can still make it around. Get it out there, bud. One second, Karen, I gotta wait for this guy. What's he doing? Okay, he's slashing me. Yeah, all the way this way. Let's go see how the roads are. I heard that the interstates are dry and good to go. Just this road here leading up to the interstates not the greatest. I-94 goes right here. We'll go right over it. Got good visibility, we can see several miles. That's good. The interstate here, oh yeah, the interstate's nice and clear. It's got a little bit of blowing, drifting snow over it. Well that's good conditions. That's good conditions in February. So I believe today when I'm filming this is February 22nd, 2022. It's Tuesday, gonna make it home today. I spent two nights in the truck. To the great state that is North Dakota. Their state slogan is be legendary. All right, so if you come to North Dakota you better be ready to be legendary. Because if you're not, you better go around. Legendary people only in this legendary state. I've been fighting the wind all day. So I've got very little fuel left. I wanted to fuel in Canada, but it looks like I better fuel now. That wind is really cold. And I don't wanna have empty fuel tanks that just leads to problems down the road as condensation builds up inside. And then moisture gets into the fuel and then about a big, about a boom, you got gelling issues, you don't want that. So we wanna keep our tanks full of fuel. Just gonna go over to the Flying J over here in Fargo. Fill ourselves up and then I will top the tanks off again once we get into Canada. Just to get some of that good Northern fuel in there. We're through the worst part of winter already. So I mean, the weather should be warming up soon, but the key word there is should. Mother nature doesn't really know what she's doing lately. I think she's drunk. I don't know, every year is just completely different than the last year. It used to be, at least I thought it used to be more reliable. You know, winter time came, you get tons of snow, it gets cold. Summer time comes, it gets warm. This time, nowadays, I don't know, some winters you get no snow, nothing. This winter you get way too much. Next winter, who knows? Maybe we'll be growing palm trees in my backyard. You never know. Even the weather people are like, I don't know what's going on. Look outside, you wanna know the weather. It's cold, that's how it feels anyway. The wind is coming out of the North, so all the way home, I'm gonna be pushing into it. Which means we're gonna be burning through a little more fuel than usual. That's why I wanna make sure that we got lots of fuel. You never know if there's gonna be a delay. You wanna make sure that in case you do get stuck that you're good to go. Got lots of fuel. Flying J. You got a fuel island open for me? Oh guys, they got like 12 fuel islands here and they're all filled up. Oh, I'm gonna go into this one. Number one. I never get this one. I wanna go home and stay on there. Sorry, DEF not working at this time. Well, I don't need DEF, I'm good for DEF. I just need fuel. Wonderful. It's full here, yikes. Manitoba has decided to greet us with blue skies, clear weather and minus 40 temperatures and a closed scale. And that's all that matters, the scale's closed. Not that I got anything to hide, I just don't like wasting my time proving that I got nothing to hide. But I understand, I get it. You gotta watch out for those guys who are hiding stuff, right? I get it. I get it, I'm just not one of those guys. So it's a waste of my time. As we're back into the snowy white north, the great white north. I don't know if it's the great white north anymore but it's the white north anyway. A lot more snow here than in Minneapolis and the weather is a lot colder. Like I said, but minus 40 outside right now. It's with wind chills, it's getting crazy. I want spring time. Wish I could have brought you a long diesel. You would have loved it, you would have loved it. One of these times, okay? Soon, soon. We do have plans for that, we do have plans. So the load was really good. The only thing that I wanna talk to you about was what I already sort of paused it for on the video before was the way I tied it down at first there and I chained it to the trailer. Now it was tied down legally and it was all good. It was nothing wrong with it in that sense but the reason we have that little seesaw, whatever you wanna call it, the T-brace or there's a name for it. Can't think of it right now but the reason we have that there is because like I was explaining before, our trailers, all trailers they flex as you go down the road and over bumps and over bridges, cement and concrete does not flex. It's not supposed to flex. So if you tie it straight down onto the trailer like that on the front, as the trailer flexes, it's going to try to flex that concrete as well. You don't want that because that could lead to cracks. Now there was no cracks on this load whatsoever. It was just fine, it was tied down legally, it was fine but the whole purpose of putting that brace on the front is to prevent any possible cracks on the concrete. That's why we have it there. So you tie it down directly to that brace and that's it, you don't tie it down to the trailer at all in the front. That brace is bolted to the trailer so it's not going anywhere. So I was corrected on that later on and I wanted to make sure I shared that with you so that you have that information as well. So if you ever get one of those trailers one day and you have that on the front and you're hauling that kind of concrete, you know, just like I know now, make sure you just tie it down to that brace, allow the trailer to move but make sure that the concrete doesn't flex. I hope that that makes sense to you but everything was fine and it was all legal and but for future, for future references, now we know. So thanks for joining me today, everybody. Don't forget, if you're interested in working with us, you're seeing the kind of fray I'm pulling around. We cover all of North America. You're gonna hear me plugging a keystone quite a bit in the future. We're really looking for new drivers and I have a new business address there just for you if you want, if you want to get a hold of me to get a job. It's for business inquiries only. I just want to let you know but the email address is truckerjosh at keystonewestern.com. It's down below in the description of all of my videos now and near the bottom of the description you just got to scroll down. If you're looking for work or maybe you're not happy with where you're at right now, you're a Canadian citizen, you have a two years experience, you have a clean driving abstract. Send me an email. We can chat for a little bit and I can forward you straight through to the correct person at work to make sure that your resume gets seen right away and that we can get you in a truck. I'd really use your help. If you're interested, let me know in the email. Again, just for business inquiries only guys. I appreciate that. Other than that, I'll see you guys all tomorrow and I hope you have a great day.