Keep on Truckin'

Yesterday, I drove from Boston to Syracuse. This is as easy-peasy a 300+ mile road trip as you're ever going to get, especially when it gets past Albany and the terrain goes flat.

The day was lovely - a January thaw's January thaw, with temps in the 60's - and I had the iPod cranking, and the window open. And since I dumped my personal vehicle, which was a standard, and was in an automatic rent a car, I just flicked into "D" and drove.

What I did was look at a lot of trucks going by, and here are the things that stood out on this trip, truck-wise.

The Boston-Syracuse route is usually flooded with WalMart trucks. Maybe it's the time of year - since the holiday crap-fest is over, there's less to deliver to the maws of WalMart - but I saw far fewer WalMart semi's than the norm. Since our economy seems in large part based on crap-consumption, what are we to make of this sign.

But the WalMart truck indicator was the only really deep truckin' thought I had on this trip. My other truck sightings were less meaningful and far quirkier.

On the Mass Pike, I saw a colossal flat bed trailing hauling lobster traps. I believe I saw this after the New York City cut off in Sturbridge, so I don't think the traps were heading for the Jersey Shore. They seemed to be heading for someplace west of the Hudson.

These were, by the way, the old fashion wood slat lobster traps.

Whatever else global warming has brought us, it has not yet brought us MidWest lobsters. Yes, the shorelines eroding, but it hasn't gotten that far yet. So, since lobster trappers in New England seem to have gone over to the new fangled plastic wired cages, I'm guessing this truck load was heading to someplace that was going to turn them into coffee tables.

In any case, a peculiar sight.

I also noticed several trucks from Teal Express. What I liked, from a marketing perspective, about these trucks was that the word "Teal" was written in the color teal. Although if you go to their web site, there's an awful lot of red, I still liked their embracing teal.

Which got me thinking about Yellow Trucking, which has always struck me as an odd name for a company whose signature color appears to be, well, orange. Okay, as we all know from the kindergarten color wheel, there's plenty of yellow in orange. Still, it's odd. (Although their version of yellow is kind of like what used to be called yellow when it was used in electric Christmas candles).

The final truck that caught my fancy was a big old truck from a company called Platonic Transport or Platonic Trucking. They had kind of a catchy motto, which I unfortunately don't remember. But what was really interesting about their truck was the cartoon of the naked female in high heels, giving that over the shoulder peek-a-boo, Vargas girl look.

I googled platonic trucking/transport, and got nada on the company. I even tried Platonic Delivery, but that just yielded Aristotle's Platonic Attitude Toward Delivery, which I couldn't bring myself to click through. (That was a long drive I took today, and, gee, I just can't imagine what was being delivered in Aristotle's day. I mean, like, they didn't have all that WalMart crap. Or even trucks to deliver anything in. I mean, like, what's Aristotle got to do with delivery? What-ever.)

But (what else) there's a blogger out there who came to rescue on Platonic's tag line:

When it comes to transportation, we don't fool around.

This was spotted by a blogger named Wic, who I believe is a trucker himself.  Here's the link to Wic's post. Thank you, Wic, for having gotten the tag line, and for assuring me that I wasn't hallucinating when I saw this truck. (A bit more googling revealed one Wicasta Lovelace, poet/artist/writer/multi-blogger and Obama guy.)

The highway is, indeed, a varied and wondrous place.