Great Smoky Mountains National Park

September 5, 2009

Today is a day to celebrate! We finally finished Blue Ridge Parkway!!! I am glad to be done and can say with confidence that I have no desire to go back anytime soon...I've seen it all (most routes I've seen more than once). Right near the end of the parkway we saw a fire truck zoom out of the maintenance area. It turned out that some guy's truck was on fire but luckily he was in a pullout and not blocking traffic. This is the 3rd car I've seen up in flames during the 5 years on the job. We also saw some elk today. That was an unexpected surprise.

We were able to start Great Smoky Mountains around 3:30pm and we collected 11 routes. Right before we walked to dinner it started to rain :(. The radar doesn't look that great so I'm not sure how things will turn out tomorrow. The only good thing is that there are a ton of people here and lots of people driving on the roads will help them dry faster. All of the hotels in town are booked and I'm very, very lucky to have made reservations a few days ago and actually found one that offered the government rate. It will be interesting to see what this place looks like on Tuesday after the big holiday weekend is over. Hopefully it will calm down some because getting across town took us about 15 minutes and this town is really, really small. We are staying across the street from Harrah's casino. We walked through it looking for restaurants and the place is defiantly not like Vegas but I'm sure those who gamble still have just as much fun. We did find a restaurant but it was typical casino food and not that fulfilling.

Blue Ridge Parkway

September 4, 2009

Today was an OK day. We collected about 75 miles and we only had one computer problem. We got lucky and were able to collect the routes we needed to before it started to rain! We only have about 55 miles left to collect in Blue Ridge and if the scattered storms don't soak the southern end we will be on track for finishing this park tomorrow!!!

Blue Ridge Parkway

September 3, 2009

We spent the morning at the Ford shop having an another alternator replaced. This time I had a spare so we just needed the labor to do it. After that the truck worked but things still didn't run the way they used to. The problem with this truck is that so many things go wrong all of the time that it is very hard to know what "normal" is. Maybe the way things are running now is "normal"...who knows. We are going to run this truck until it smokes or dies and hopefully it won't happen in a place we don't have cell coverage. We didn't start collection until 2pm and we had some computer issues to deal with so we didn't get much done but we did collect 54 miles...I'll take it.

Blue Ridge Parkway

September 2, 2009

Today was a good and bad day. We were able to collect 131 miles but it was painful. It was a crazy day that started at 8:00am and at 11:00pm I'm finally done working and writing my blog entry for the day.

The bad parts of today were:

We had several problems with the truck today. We had to restart all of the systems at least 4 times, which is a minimum of a 10 minute process. Our forward facing cameras were dropping images, not synchronizing properly, we had crossfall chainage errors and missing chainage messages/errors. We might have another alternator going bad but we left that for tomorrow to further investigate.

The good parts of today were:

We made it 100 miles further down the parkway and the roads were dry!

While we were pulled over swapping a computer part I took a quick photo, it is attached.

Blue Ridge Parkway

September 1, 2009
We got the truck back today around noon. We turned everything on and the alternators were not charging the batteries! After some investigating on our own we decided to swap regulators (again) and it worked. We drove to our first route and I got out to open the gate and walked back to the truck and realized that someone at one of the repair shops hit something with our sensor bar on the front of the truck. Luckily they did not hit it hard but they did not fess up to it when we picked up the truck and I didn't notice it until after we left. If this truck were not on it's last leg there would have been a lengthy discussion about the situation but since this truck is on it's way out I figured it wasn't worth trying to get them to admit to their fault. They will have to live with it on their conscience anyway. We were able to collect a couple of small routes around Asheville that were wet last week. It is good to finally have those crossed off of our list. We drove south and 2 routes are still wet so they will have to wait a few more days. During the few routes we did collect we had a communication issue with our sensor bar on the front of the truck. The easy "check the network cable fix" did nothing for us. I ended up taking apart one of the computers while Jeff took out a timer chip on a board in the sensor bar, neither is a fun job. After that we did some test runs and it appears to be working but when we finished putting things back together it was about 4:30pm and there was no time to make the long drive to other routes. On the way back I stopped along the parkway where you can see the Biltmore house. It is a huge house you can tour (I have not had time to go there). A photo does not do it justice especially when you are so far away but I posted a couple of photos anyway.

http://www.biltmore.com/visit/house/default.asp