Made it home for a few days

July 31, 2009
I finally made it home at 9:40pm (11:40pm Eastern time)! It was a very long day.

While I was still in Richmond this morning I called the shop we dropped the truck off at last night. They said they looked at the weight stamp on the door and it was 8,000 lbs and their lift could only handle 10,000. I told them that 8,000 was not 10,000 and their lift should be fine and I explained that I had our truck officially weighted prior to going to Hawaii and it is not over 9,000 lbs. The guy tried to make excuses but bottom line is that they didn't want to do the work. Some places don't want to risk touching our truck, which is fine as long as they are honest about it. So the tire rotation and balance has yet to happen. I took the truck to a Ford shop that claims to have a lift rated for up to 16,000 lbs. If it isn't one thing to deal with it is another.

My flight from Richmond to Washington Dulles was more eventful than I wanted it to be. I can usually handle a lot of turbulence and not mind but today was really bad. When we left Richmond the weather had not gotten to Dulles yet but by the time we were about 10 minutes away from landing the storms developed rapidly over the area and we felt every bit of it. I can handle a few pockets of air but when the plane keeps dropping and then goes up and comes back down and you hear the engine roar louder... it is not that comforting. When we landed everyone looked sick but we all started clapping. I was however one of the few lucky people that didn't have any flight delays. Due to the crazy weather both Dulles and Denver had long line at the service counters because people missed their connecting flights. I am glad to be back after a trip full of van attitude and humidity.

I won't be back out on the road until August 10th ish so you probalby won't see another blog entry until then.

Fixing the truck, still in Richmond

July 30, 2009
Another day fixing the truck. It was productive but again the humidity is really terrible. I'm going home tomorrow (finally) and can't wait to get back to Colorado where the humidity is never really noticed. The truck seems to be working OK again. We still have the typical issues with the old systems we have but we can deal with it. As long as the major things work we are happy. We decided to go to downtown Richmond to check out the Capitol. We got there late so it wasn't open but it was still nice to walk around. We didn't stay for long because there was a storm moving our way with really dark clouds.

We took did take the truck to a tire shop over lunch time (I won't say which shop) to see if they could rotate our tires. Why is it that workers don't know how many pounds their car lift can handle? That is crazy! When I asked him over and over if they could lift our truck he said "I don't know until we try it"...really? He said the lift is only rated for 6,000 lbs and I said our truck is just over 8,000 and he still said "maybe we can do it but I don't know until we try". The outcome is obvious; they couldn't lift the truck so we had to take the truck to another shop that hopefully knows more about their equipment. We'll see if I get a call in the morning with bad news.

Fixing the truck in Richmond, VA

July 29, 2009
We drove 4 hours to Richmond, VA today. It is very, very humid here and working on the truck in humidity can be very draining. We made some progress today but we have lots to do tomorrow. We are working on pavement camera, shore power (outlet power) and roughness issues. We went to Napa today and that store does sell isolators...who knew! Our trip to Home Depot will be tomorrow morning. Those seem to be our two most commonly visited stores for parts when the truck needs repairs.

Blue Ridge Parkway

July 28, 2009
I knew it would happen sooner or later. The truck has given up on us. Today was supposed to be the perfect day, no rain, collect more miles, little problems...didn't happen. It was one of the worst days for the truck. For some reason this afternoon we stopped getting roughness data but the truck didn't tell us (we usually get an error) so we kept collecting. Later we realized...no roughness data...30 miles down the drain and time wasted. In the 5 years I have had this job I've never had this issue occur with no obvious fix. We also have a pavement camera that is acting up and our quick fixes are not fixing the problem anymore so we need a new camera. These issues are pretty big so we have to end collection in Blue Ridge for now and drive to Richmond tomorrow to fix our truck.

I didn't get any good photos today so I'll post some of the photos I took of the errors in the truck. The middle image is normal and the top image shows a crazy error with the numbers. The blue image occurred when shutting down a computer...blue screen of death maybe?

It's all in a days work.

Blue Ridge Parkway

July 27, 2009
I realized today that I started this blog at a really bad time in my travels. Blue Ridge Parkway is the largest/longest park we have to collect so there will be a lot of blog entries from this park. I am trying to post things that happen each day but I hope that since I'll be at this park for some time you all don't loose interest.

Nothing major happened today as far as work goes. We were able to work today despite rain in the area but we had to stop around 3:00 due to wet roads. That was OK because we still had an hour drive back to the hotel and some work to do when we got to the hotel. There was no sulfur smell in the truck today so that was also a plus.

I've seen several animals along the parkway. This place has a ton of black butterflies/moths with blue tails. I haven't been quick enough to get a photo of a living one yet but they are everywhere. There are also woodchucks everywhere. No luck on getting a photo of one of them either. There was a near miss yesterday where one almost got squashed by our truck, luckily it was able to escape. The usual deer are around. I saw a dead turkey vulture on the road yesterday. It was weird because turkey vultures are not usually seen on the ground, or on/near a road. It must have been eating something before it's life was ended but I still can't imagine that a car didn't scare it away...weird. Today we saw a black rat snake in the middle of the road. Both Jeff and I would have put money on it being dead. I felt bad because I didn't want it to continually be run over even if it was dead. We went around a loop and when we got back it was gone! We were both shocked! The snake really looked dead but I guess it wasn't...good for it! I was able to get a photo of another black rat snake we saw later in the day. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough with the camera to snap a photo when the snake was on the side of the road so the grass photo is all I got.

I tried the panoramic option on my camera today for the first time. The photo turned out pretty good. The photo shows the clouds building in the area.