AllAmericanPilotCarServices.com

For those of you who have done route surveys, you will understand the use of the word lottery.  Sometimes, it is just the luck of the draw on which route will work out.

Today I completed one route survey and began another one.  My second survey of the day is for the exact same load that I took through a couple of weeks ago…but I thought I would find a shortcut and save my customer about 100 miles.  I got three quarters of the way through the shortcut when I encountered an overpass that is five inches too low.

Two years ago, I measured that overpass and it was 2 inches higher than my load for this new survey, so I thought for sure I could get my load through.  WRONG!!  Apparently, at some point over the past 2 years, someone repaved the road underneath that overpass.  That’s the only logical explanation I can come up with.  SURELY I measured it accurately 2 years ago, so that couldn’t be it.  There is an important point here, for those of you just learning to perform route surveys:  NEVER EVER simply do a book survey because you think you know your route “like the back of your hand”.  Stuff happens!  Things change!  There is just too much at stake to do a so-called “book” survey.  People get hurt and loads get destroyed and overpasses or bridges get damaged when you do things like that…not to mention HUGE claims against your liability insurance.  Every time I have tried to do a “book” survey, I got caught at it, and that is embarrassing.

Anyway, I had to backtrack about 100 miles and start over on my second survey.  That puts me about a half day behind where I wanted to be by now.  Hopefully I will finish it up on Friday.

I dodged a big weather bullet last night.  As I got into Tucumcari last night, a serious storm was coming through town.  I pulled into a parking lot and waited for about 20 minutes until things cleared up.  I never saw anything, so I had dinner, went to my room and went to bed.  This morning, I learned that  a tornado apparently had passed over me and struck a house not even a half mile from where I had parked.  (Someone up there likes me.  Who knows why?)

I am in Bernalillo, NM, tonight.