1/31/18 LIVE CHAT Follow Up: Avoiding Overpass Crashes

Thanks Paul! Although we didn't mention that here during the follow up chat, we did include it in the original video. Thanks for mentioning it here, too, since it's so important.

Good advice, Iggy! Must've been quite a surprise to try and drive under cables you'd successfully passed under countless times before... and have them scrape! As always, nothing beats being vigilant and paying careful attention... but you can't catch EVERYTHING! Glad you got the cable company to raise that line up for you!

Thanks so much for your nice comments, Vic! And congrats on your new RV! :)

Hi Ian! Thank you so much for your very kind comments, and great question! So.... this requires a bit of a long-winded explanation, since it's fair to assume that having been full-time for all these years, we'd have lots of standard planning tools in place for routing. First off, RV GPS didn't exist when we hit the road in '03, so by the time it came out, we were already used to navigating without it. And the fact that we've never heard of a single unit that gets rave reviews that we felt we could absolutely trust, we just never bought one. We have a plain old Tom Tom that has no settings for height or weight.

Another thing for us was that we lived all our lives on the East Coast, and one of the factors that led us to start RVing was having discovered the incredible dramatic natural beauty of the West. So it was a natural thing for us to spend the vast majority of our time west of the Rockies once we hit the road, and there are a lot fewer low overpasses out here compared to the NE. The rare times we RV East, we're usually not heading into remote areas seeking natural beauty (because, frankly, once you've been in the Rockies, Cascades, Sierras, etc, the Poconos and Blue Ridge Mountains, while nice, pale in comparison). We've been in 49 of the 50 States, but we're definitely spoiled by the West. So now when we go East, we're mostly visiting family, and generally stay on more major roads to reach them, and know the areas we're headed into.

One other factor is our travel style... we sometimes don't know exactly where we're going when we get up in the morning. Rather than sit down to map out a route, we head in a direction, and take whatever route seems interesting.

One last factor is my (Peter) experience. Having taught probably 700+ motor coach operators during nearly 10 years running a large training program, and having won a shelf full of trophies competing in bus driving competitions (yes, such a thing exists!). So I have an unfair advantage. Not that I'm looking to be stuck nosed up to an 11' overpass on a winding country road or anything, but I lack any real fear about how I would extricate myself. But the reason it's never happened is partly due to my deeply-engrained observational habits. Not that there's no such thing as an overpass without advance warning signs.... but if they ARE there, I'm not likely to miss 'em. ;-)

Long story short(er).... to a very large extent, we wing it, because we want to explore remote scenic areas, and are okay depending purely on our observational and driving skills to manage it. It's definitely not something I recommend for everyone, so any additional tools are a good idea.... the best-rated RV GPS you can find, a motor carriers atlas, an app or two, and some planning using Google Street View are all worthwhile parts of the safety arsenal for most RVers.

What a great idea, Chris! When we drove a campervan from Port Douglas to Sydney a couple of years ago, we obviously didn't even think about height, since we didn't have anything to worry about in our little van. But it sure would be a big deal in a bigger rig.