Blue Ridge Parkway

August 13, 2009

Today started off with wet roads but we were able to collect around 9:30am....not bad. We had some collection problems in the morning that I would consider "minor" right now. We lost frames on one of our forward facing cameras a couple of times and we got a chainage error a couple of times, both errors caused us to stop the files and start again. Those things are annoying but we can deal with it. About 1:00pm we ran into rain. Since this park is so spread out we were confident we would drive out of the rain, which we did. However, on our way to another route I started smelling a really bad smell in the truck that I've never smelled before and then I saw white smoke...great! I knew the smell wasn't a belt, it wasn't the brakes, it wasn't an overheating battery...I had no idea. We got out of the truck and looked things over and saw nothing obvious. We drove about 15 miles to a Ford dealer, which happened to be near our hotel, and talked to them about the issue. They were nice people but little help at that time. I called a guy from the company who made the truck and told them what happened and he said I think it is your air conditioner. Sure enough our air conditioner is busted and smells terrible. I'm pretty sure I lost another day or two off of my life having to breathe that stuff in. Since we are in such a small town access to parts is limited. Tomorrow we are driving to Winston-Salem, NC to a bigger Ford dealer. They can hopefully work a miracle in a short amount of time and get us back on the road.

On a good note we did get about 4 hours of collection in this morning, not great but I'll definitely take it. We finally crossed the VA/NC state border and I took a quick photo of the sign. I was also able to get a photo of one of those black butterflies we see everywhere along the parkway. I'm not sure what they are but they are everywhere. I also took a photo of the typical scenery in this area...some nice black cows in a field along the parkway.

Blue Ridge Parkway

August 12, 2009
The good news for the day is the truck is fixed! The new cable worked like magic. We had a bit of a delay this morning because we thought we were going to get the cable by 10:30am but we didn't get it until 2:30pm. The roads were wet in the morning so we couldn't have collected anyway. By the afternoon the roads were dry, the cable was installed and all went well. We didn't start collection at 4:00pm and we ended around 6:45pm. We had to stop collection because the sun was low in the sky we were getting bad sun glare in our images, we had to call it a day.

Blue Ridge Parkway

August 11, 2009
We had to calibrate our DMI (distance measuring instrument) this morning since we got the tires rotated last week. The calibration can usually be done in about 3 runs but today it took us about 9 runs. I guess that was a warning sign as to what the rest of our day would be like....not so good. We actually did collect one good route along the parkway but that was where our good day started and ended. Roughness stopped working again. After taking out our laser computer several times we realized that we had "newer" spare timer cards but our truck has an older cable so "new" and "old" don' t mix. A small oversight by those who put together our spare parts box. So, we didn't have the part we needed to fix the truck. We are now at the mercy of FedEx. We should get the new cable by 10:30am tomorrow. We are also going to be fighting the weather this week. There is a chance of rain everyday this week. The storms are supposed to be random and scattered so planning for them is impossible. When it starts to rain our work day ends.

Blue Ridge Parkway

August 10, 2009
I'm now back on the road after a very short week at home in Denver. It was nice to recover a bit and have a break from the truck. Today was a very long day of travel. I got up this morning at 3:00am (MTN), left my house at 4:00am and arrived at our Hillsville, VA hotel at 7:00pm (EST). The only delay was from Washington Dulles to Richmond. There was a runway closure at Dulles and it took the air traffic controllers time to reorganize all of the airplanes. It set us back about 20 minutes and the airplane was very hot inside during our wait. Everything else went smoothly. We will start collection again tomorrow and I am hoping for a better trip this time with less van problems. I'll keep you posted.

Home but with little rest

August 3, 2009

OK, so I know this is a travel blog but since this entry involves a car I'm going to pretend it qualifies as a legitimate posting. Some of you already know that Denver had a really bad storm hit the West side of town on July 20th. From what I hear it didn't last much longer than 10 to 15 minutes but it caused a lot of damage. I've lived in Colorado for several years now and have been lucky enough to avoid the damaging storms but my time is now up. My car ('06 Ford Escape) suffered some pretty bad hail damage from that storm (I was in Virginia). All of the insurance companies have big tents set up around town with big trucks that say "disaster relief". Today I got to visit one of those tents. There are a lot of cars that have hail damage but from the 4 other cars I saw in "my" tent I must say my car looked the worst. Most cars had small dents while I got mostly deep dents. I am not as upset about it as I thought I would be. It is nothing a check for just over $7,000.00 won't fix. The more annoying part is that is it just another thing I have to fit in during my few short days at home. I posted one photo but really no photo does the damage justice. It is hard to get a good photo without crazy glare.

On a work related note, my program is in the process of purchasing a new data collection vehicle. Today at the office I started looking at proposals submitted for a new truck. I am very excited and after we get a new truck hopefully my blog won't be filled with breakdown entries :) ! It will still be another 5 months or so before we get a new truck but I'm happy the count down has started.