Curse of the Tires

A.I. generated photo of my flat tire and where I was last week, though the flat tire and beach weren't at the same time.

Just a couple days before our expected departure, we were on our way to Christmas Eve mass and I glanced down at the digital cluster display and noticed that one tire only had 11 pounds of pressure in it compared to the others with 36 pounds. I have only 3600 miles on these tires so I was pretty sure it wasn't the tire sensors themselves. When I pulled into our parking spot at the church, I walked around and yes, it was definitely very low. 

I have been cursed with tires of late it seems. On my previous vehicle, I have blogged about the expensive run flats that come on it because the all wheel drive (AWD) feature of it means there is no room to store a spare tire. Run flat tires, while handy to have, are super expensive to replace. On my first long road trip, I was pulling over to a curb in a no parking area in downtown Charleston, South Carolina for a quick, and safe peek at my phone to ensure I was heading the right direction. I ended up pulling just a little too close to the curb that happened to be lined with very sharp rocks for some reason and immediately slashed the sidewall. Fortunately being run flats, I was able to drive on to the local dealership where some $1200 later, I had four new run flats installed. With AWD, the tires need to be fairly matched in size to ensure you don't destroy that transmission and all my tires were half worn at that point necessitating four new tires instead of just one.

A year later on another long road trip, heavy downtown traffic in Denver swerved just in time for me to see a huge crater of a pothole that I couldn't avoid, rupturing the sidewall of another tire. Once again, I drove onto the nearest dealer and $1400 later, I had four new tires for the same reason mentioned above.

I won't go into details but I think I only wore one set of tires completely down on that van in all the years I owned it and spent countless thousands of dollars replacing half worn tires due to the AWD system and because they were run flats. The day I traded it in for my new ride, was a happy day indeed, at least until two and a half months later when I discovered it was extremely low in the church parking lot.

After Christmas Eve mass, I walked out to discover it was very low at that point but the rim was still above ground. The digital display now registered 0 pounds of pressure but there was a gas station just two blocks away and I thought if I could drive really slow, I might make it there and be able to air up the tire enough to get home and deal with the situation on Christmas day. I did make it there but they didn't have any air hose to inflate tires and so I changed the tire, installing the spare right there in the parking lot, in my church clothes and in the rain. Fortunately this vehicle doesn't have run flats and even though it still has AWD, it has room for a spare tire. 

I made it home and tried to forget about it all Christmas day and hoped to deal with it on the Friday afterwards. I first went to the dealership where they found a screw causing the flatness but it was in the sidewall and not repairable. They did not have a tire that fit in stock. I drove down the road to a tire shop that has a single tire in stock that would work and for $230, I was on the road. This time, I lucked out since all the tires were fairly new, replacing it with a new tire meant it was close enough in tire diameter not to cause problems with the AWD system. I got lucky. To ward off any potential spirits, I bought a tire plugging kit to carry in the vehicle just in case. 

With the tire fixed, we are packing today and away early in the morning on a long road trip. Hopefully I left the tire curse at home for the duration of this trip.