I think we all know on some level that our country only functions because of trucks. Almost everything we buy, drive, eat, etc. comes to us on a truck, and yet they’re so common that we not only take them for granted… we don’t even see them anymore. I spend a lot of time on the road, and most of the time I don’t really notice the specifics of the trucks myself, but this week for some reason I was noticing all kinds of things being hauled around the Midwest. Here are just a few of the more interesting things I saw on my trip up to Minneapolis last weekend:

  • An entire flatbed full of steel train wheels.
  • Two GIANT McDonald’s Arches. So big that they had to lie them on their sides.
  • I don’t know what they were hauling, but I saw the semi that has the Marines sword on the side. It’s the full length of the trailer, so it’s HUGE, and it says, “Earned. Never given.”
  • Big steel tubes
  • Massive rolls of metal sheet that are so heavy they can only put one or two on a flatbed trailer at a time.
  • An entire locomotive frame. It was just the structure, the walkway around the outside (with railing), and the huge gas tanks underneath.
  • Explosives. That’s right… an entire truck with specially built containers full of explosives.
  • Russet potatoes, mmm….
  • Tractors. They take the wheels off, and just stack ’em up. It’s really cool.
  • Fire hydrants. I have to assume that they were being shipped up from the fire hydrant factory, ‘cuz it was a whole truck full of ’em. It was about 8-10 feet of pipe with a hydrant on the top of each one. They were stacked on their sides maybe 4 or 5 high.

I always wonder what is in all of the other trucks that have no markings on them. When I worked at REI I was often on truck-unloading duty. Our stuff only took up half the truck, and the stuff in the other half was always pretty cool. Once it was a tractor, once it was giant stacks of plastic storage bins, and once it was massive rolls of empty bags for frozen vegetables on their way to be filled. The veggie bags were actually the most impressive because they were so incredibly heavy. You wouldn’t think that plastic bags would be heavy, but they were in these big, tightly-wound rolls, and then stacked high on pallets. Everything that we ever got for our store could be easily moved by one person with a pallet jack. It took FIVE of us just to get the towers of veggie bags rolling after we got them off the ground on our pallet jack. It was crazy. I really thought that our buddy Trucker Dave was going to have a heart attack right there in our warehouse.

So truckers, keep it rolling, and thanks.