Ok so Ive decided to document a Uship trip from start to finish to shed a little more
light on what its like to make money with a pickup truck out on the road.
Previously I made a video all about the booking process, so check that out up here if you
want to see that in a little more depth. I am a motorsports photographer, and I had
another trip planned up to Road America, which is up in Elkhart Lake Wisconsin, to shoot
a mini documentary of the Gorilla Sticker Endurance Racing Team. I like to drive to
these gigs rather than fly because a: I can bring a lot more stuff a lot easier, and b:
my cargo trailer doubles as an office and a hotel at the event. These endurance races
take place over a three day weekend. So step one was finding a couple loads going
the same way as me; I start looking for loads about a week before leaving to leave some
time for potential negotiations of dates or bidding with other shippers. I hopped on uship.com
and put in where I was going - you have the option to tell it to look along youre entire
route, rather than having to pick starting and ending cities, there are a lot more options
this way - although as you’ll see a bit later, you open yourself up to some potential
scheduling conflicts. Hey nic, put in a clip of me talking about going the wrong way back
to georgia. I ended up booking a set of antique cabinets
going up from South Carolina, a couple of zero turn lawn mowers from georgia up to Wisconsin,
and a Harley for the return trip. I dont usually go crazy with the amount of stuff I bring
with me - I only use Uship to PAY for the gas and food on the trips I take, rather than
to maximize the amount of money I make. I could have easily bid on a dozen more things
and picked up and dropped off 3 or 4 items in each direction if I wanted to stay out
on the road longer and really make as much as I could make. Im primarily a photographer,
Ushippin to make it more lucrative. So with a few things booked, I packed up my
camera gear - hopped in my truck and went to go grab my trailer. I bought some vacant
residential land a few years ago after my neighborhood association started being mean
about having a trailer in the drive way - and Im glad I did because now I have two cargo
trailers and an RV to park and that would never fly in pretty much any neighborhood!
At this point, the trip is officially on.. (CUE CLIP OF FORGETTING TOOTHBRUSH).
My first stop was in south carolina, I left in the middle of the day on a wednesday with
the intention of getting to that pickup location, which turned out to be a flea market kind
of off the beaten path. They were closed but the woman I was delivering to worked it out
with the owner of the storage to get me in there and help drag out these ornamental cabinets.
So, with a little bit of a struggle because they were basically about an inch shorter
than the height of trailers rear door, I managed to get them shoved in, covered up and strapped
down. It was at this point that I realized I had
made a stupid mistake in my planning because I had booked a load in georgia for two riding
lawnmowers - those were going all the way up to wisconsin, but these cabinets were only
going 3 hours up the road.. But the guy with the mowers had bought them from a dealership
and they weren’t ready on that wednesday in the first half of the day, which was the
original plan, so I decided I would just grab these cabinets and then bip bop back on over
to Georgia to grab the mowers and then zig zag back north and drop everything off..
Well I didn’t do the real math for mileage.. So, you can set the search perimeters on Uship
to allow a certain number of miles to deviate from your path, say youre willing to go 50
miles extra from your original drive to expand the list of available loads.. But these two
loads just happened to be 50 miles each in the exact opposite and opposing directions
from one another, which meant an extra 100 miles backwards to get the mowers, and then
still another extra 50 to drop off the cabinets.. I was going to run out of daylight, and mess
up the timing for the rest of the trip, so I decided to cancel on the mowers.. I hate
canceling a load, it looks bad on your profile and leaves people having to find another shipper.
But I had a deadline at the race, and it just wasn’t going to work.
So, on to the cabinet drop off - 3 and a half hours north. I got to their neighborhood and
that was a pleasant surprise! One of the nicer places Ive had the pleasure of making a delivery
- really pretty houses. UnFORTUNATELY, the lady forgot to put in her
ad that these sort of giant cabinets needed to go up to the second floor!!! I dont normally
do deliveries all the way into the final resting place of
the items. It just comes with all sorts of possibilities for things to break, or time
to be lost.. Which is why i USUALLY stick to cars, 4 wheelers and motorcycles. But,
these people were SO nice, and so willing to help, that I agreed, and we wrestled three
of these big wooden, antique, fragile and delicate as fuck cabinets up and into their
master bedroom. He did tip me 50 bucks at the end, which is probably paid for all the
food on my way up, so thats nice! Then it was basically just on to Elkhart lake.
The rest of my trip up was with an empty trailer. I had already booked a motorcycle for the
ride back, and with that and these cabinets, my trip had been covered - so I was fine with
the relief knowing I was no longer in the care of anyone else’s things.
It was just time to relax and enjoy the road… (road trip compilation) Loves truck stops
get pretty much all of my money on these trips. They have a loyalty program for cheaper gas,
they always have clean bathrooms, you can even pay a few bucks a take a shower at Loves!
and they have these little packs of meat, cheese and crackers which are pretty much
like classy lunchables.. They’re delicious and I ate a bunch of them over the course
of this trip. I got to the track, did the race stuff and
on Sunday night after a team dinner I headed home. I wanted to try to get far enough south
that I wouldn’t freeze sleeping in the back of the truck. (insert clip of sleeping in
the back of the truck and who knew its still winter in april).
By this time I had set up a second pickup of whats called a bachelors chest at this
VERY large antique store, but first I had to grab a harley from somewhere in Illinois.
Of course the place didn’t open until 10am, so I had a leisurely morning hanging out in
the truck before rolling this big boy into the back. Got that strapped down and headed
just about 30 miles east to this very busy and very large antique megastore.
The man there, Jeffrey, was very nice - however he had forgotten about our meeting time and
didn’t have the chest ready for me when I got there. So I sat. A few minutes turned
into an hour before he finally came back to me looking at his feet, admitting he and his
staff simply couldn’t find the thing! He didn’t want to waste any more man hours
looking and I didn’t want to waste any more time in Illinois so we both cut our losses
and I left empty handed. That was the first time thats ever happened to me…
It wasn’t all bad, though - that load was going to put me all the way over to the east
coast to i95 on my way back to Florida, and it was about 5 hours shorter drive to head
down 75 instead. Fun fact, all the interstates going north/south
in the United States have odd numbers, low numbers starting in the west - getting higher
to the east.. Likewise, the east/west moving interstates are even numbered, low numbers
in the south getting higher the further north they are.
The motorcycle was going to Louisville, Ky which fortunately I was going to make it to
the same day, but unfortunately after the dealership closed because of that 10am opening
time to pick it up.. Mike at the Louisville Harley Dealership was nice enough to allow
me to quietly drop it around back at the loading dock in the dark of night, so I could continue
on my trip south. After that, I was empty again and it was smooth
sailing back to Florida. Im sure I could have hopped back on the app and found more stuff
going south, but I was pretty tired of making plans and sleeping in the back of a truck,
plus all my expenses had been covered - and of course I got paid to take photos as well
when I was up in Wisconsin, so I just took a bee line and charged on the rest of the
way (cue probably out of order road trip montage). I occasionally take these trips with my toy
hauler RV rather than the cargo trailer. It DOES have a cargo space, but its only 13 feet
deep, where my car hauler is 26 - so its a matter of easy shipping vs easy living.. This
time I had initially thought I was bringing up those giant mowers next to the big cabinets,
but in hindsight I could have had the comfort, and the furnace, of the RV after all.. Win
some Lose some.. And that wraps it up! I got a ton of footage
for my next couple photography videos Im making at home, had another pretty fun adventure
and probably my last road trip in a few months since my ArtWorld Production gig is finally
starting back up now after a quick little 13 month hiatus!
Hope this gave some insight into how these trips can go if youre just considering using
uhsip to pay for trips or maybe as a full time gig. Both are easily doable, especially
so if you own a heavy duty truck and a trailer! But even a truck alone works just fine, theres
always a boat that needs tugging up the east coast..
If you have any questions - leave them in the comments and Ill tell you what
I know.. uh g’bye