Joan and I left Sacramento at 9:00 am driving in our trusty 1994 Thunderbird with 130,000 miles on the odometer. Driving in the Sierra Nevada mountains on I-80 between Auburn, California and Reno, Nevada, I approached a semi truck which was driving in the right hand lane. As I neared the truck to pass I heard a loud whining noise. Joan asked me what the noise was and I remarked that it must be coming from the truck but as I sped up to pass him, the noise got louder. Sensing something was not right, I slowed down and the noise got quieter. This was when I realized it was our car. Hoping it was not the transmission, I pulled off onto the shoulder, got out and looked and, to my dismay, I discovered the left rear tire was flat. Not only was it flat, it had a 3-inch hole in the side of it. The tires were 5 year old Michelins and I was planning on replacing them next year. I had read that tires have a life of 6 years regardless of how much tread was left and I now believe them. The fact that the car sits outside in 100 degrees weather in the summer further compounds the problem. Since I was parked in a precarious place, I drove to a wider area and pulled off. I looked around for a rock to put under the rear wheel to keep the car from rolling back when I jacked it up. Lo and behold, the only good sized rock in sight was sitting right by the car! I then proceeded to unload the trunk to get the spare tire out. As I was doing that, a pickup truck pulled off the road and backed up to the car. A man and his wife got out and the man asked if I needed help. I said sure and proceeded to jack up the car. He undid the lug nuts, removed the wheel, installed the spare and I lowered the jack. During all of this, he remarked that he always stopped to help older people (I guess he meant me) in trouble. He said young people needed the experience. While this was going on, Joan was talking to his wife and discovered that her husband was a mechanic that lived in Auburn and grew up in Applegate not far from where I was parked. Upon finishing, he handed me a wet cleaning rag to wipe off my hands and then told us there was a good tire shop just up the road at Colfax where they would treat us right and not try to rip us off. We proceeded to the tire shop. The owner looked at the other tires and said the sidewalls were showing signs of cracking. I told him to go ahead and put 4 tires on it and asked how long it would take. He said about 45 minutes and he was correct almost to the minute. The price was only $50 more than I paid for tires 5 years ago at Costco.
We then headed down the road to have a late lunch with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, wondering what else could go wrong today. We turned at Truckee and went around Lake to Tahoe to I-50 and encountered a short delay due to road construction, not realizing this was an omen of things to come. Leaving Carson City, we proceeded to Winnemuca where I discovered it was now 6:30 pm, the time I should have arrived in Elko, so we decided to stop for dinner. Without going into any detail, I proceeded to accidentally dump the ice chest on the passenger seat which was now covered with an inch of ice cold water. I got what I could off of the seat and then rummaged around the trunk and discovered I had a bunch of plastic bags which I had forgotten to take out and a bath towel. Coincidence? These were used to give Joan a dry seat for the ride home. After dinner, we headed for Elko.
After we left Winnemucca, we began encountering Nevada's famous system of miles and miles of one lane traffic with large barricades on one side and 55 mph speed limits and not a sign of construction anywhere. After it got dark, we went thru a few sections that had concrete barricades with reflectors on top on both sides of the road, sort of like driving thru a tunnel with a thousand lights in your eyes. I swear, I will be dreaming of barricades for days. We finally reached out destination at 9:00 pm, 12 hours and 450 miles later. The good part is that we got 28 miles per gallon due to the long slow stretches, it didn't happen at night in the middle of Nevada, and no harm was done (except to the tire). Either someone was looking out for us or there was a whole lot of luck on this trip. I tend to believe the former. So what do you think? Coincidence or luck?
