Flat Tire--Oh No!

Thursday night we hooked up in the North Llano River RV Park in Junction, just off I-10. We fueled the truck, bought a few groceries and then picked up two pounds of open pit barbequed brisket at Lum's. That was a really good choice. The meat was sooo tender.

This morning we continued west, headed for Fort Stockton. It was a scenic drive through the hill country of Texas.



We fueled up in Bakersfield, then 14 miles on we heard and felt a bang or thud. Then our Pressure-Pro tire monitoring system started screeching. John saw a piece of tire fly off to the left and I looked in the side-view mirror and saw the fender over our RV tires flapping. We quickly pulled off on the edge of the road. No surprise, really, we had a flat tire.



Fortunately, we have not experienced that before on the RV. Hopefully, this will be the first and last time. While John figured out how to lower the spare tire and tried to jack up the trailer, I called our Good Sam Emergency Road Service.





We were almost in the middle of nowhere, but they found Oasis Tire Service in Fort Stockton and Blake came to change our tire.



This strip of tire tread was wrapped around the RV's axle.



As we waited, we were buffeted by winds from passing trucks and RVs that didn't pull over into the left lane when they saw us on the side of the road. That will make us even more aware of how important it is to get over for stalled vehicles, law enforcement and highway workers. "Pull over or slow down" is really important advice. We then followed Blake into town and went to their downtown location, where we purchased four new tires.



We had anticipated doing that before we went into Canada on our way to Alaska. But not before we got out of Texas. A couple of weeks ago, we bought four new tires for the truck. That makes $1800 of tires in two weeks. Ouch. The good news was that all of this--from blowout to four new tires--only took less than four hours. Not bad. No one was injured and the RV appears of have only minimal damage. It could have been so much worse.

But we weren't done yet. We were setting up at Fort Stockton RV Park and as we leveled the RV, it appeared the front landing gear isn't working correctly. It was installed in April 2011. We don't know what tomorrow will bring.