Blue Ridge Parkway

August 18, 2009
Today started out with a visit to Firestone. It turns out that the nail in our tire almost "went through the other side" (not sure what that means) and because of the way the nail went into the tire we needed to have it replaced rather than have it patched. It took 1 1/2 off of our morning collection time. We then drove 2 hours north to get to some routes we needed to collect. We found that 3 of them were still wet so we collected a few others and sure enough it started to rain on us. We were able to drive out of the rain going south and we collected 5 more routes making the total for today 10 routes, but the total collection mileage was only 3.93 miles...not good. While we were driving I noticed a sulfur smell in the truck again. I looked at the voltages and they were up to 16, which is very high. They should be around 14 volts when we are driving. Turns out our regulator went bad but we did have a spare. It would have been easy to replace if it wasn't bolded in behind the grill on the front of our truck. It took us an hour to take the front of the truck apart, get the regulator out and put everything back to "normal". We did loose one screw in the abyss of the chassis but luckily we also carry plenty of spare screws :). The whole thing wouldn't have been so bad but anything that makes me have dirt under my nails for the rest of the day I could do without. It was not a clean job to undertake. After we were finished we were on our way back down the parkway.