We knew life wouldn’t always be sunshine and warm chocolate chip cookies out here on the road and that there were going to be some setbacks that we’d have to face. Well October 8th on this dirt road in the middle of the Navajo Indian Reservation in northwestern New Mexico presented us one such setback.
Seeing as how we had nearly 27,000 miles of driving on Toad’s original tires plus another 18,000 towing miles on them, we knew we were pushing our luck on this set, and we were going to be replacing all four tires when we got to Flagstaff a few days later. Really, we were…! Well, we didn’t quite make it to Flagstaff. En route to visiting a remote national historical park; actually leaving the site and heading back to main roads to pick up Charley and continuing west on Route 66 towards Flagstaff, one of our tires had had enough road use. We heard a pop and a fizz and immediately understood our grim situation.
Fortunately the little spare ‘donut’ tire that we found in the trunk was inflated, so with a quick peek at the manual to make sure he knew the best jack point, my strapping, strong husband went to work to get us mobile again.
We breathed a sigh of relief when we made it out to the paved road — after the tire change we still had 14 miles left on this 20-mile dirt path that was full of rocks, large and small. We felt a bit more confident when we got on the highway heading in the direction of a larger town. And we were really pleased when we found a tire place in Gallup, NM, our destination town, that had four of the tires we needed and that they were open until 6 o’clock.
The boys at American Tire made quick work of removing, balancing, and replacing our four worn tires with four new ones, and with that, we were on the road again, grateful for new treads and for the fact that our tire episode wasn’t so bad after all… says the one who didn’t have to change the tire!
