Uneventful Trip Due to a Lot of Luck

It all started Monday afternoon when Harry decided to turn the tire pressure monitoring system on to check the tires as he always does before a travel day. He often has to put tire in the rv tires, but only rarely in the truck tires. Since he had just gotten the truck tires up to pressure before we left Avon Park, he was expecting them to be good. So he was really surprised to see that the inner rear dual tire was reading at 48 psi, way down from the 65 psi that Harry keeps them at. We both took a look at the tire and couldn’t see anything obvious, but it was a little worrisome to have it come up the day before we were traveling.

Harry brought it back up to pressure, and then we kept an eye on it the rest of the evening. It was holding fine, so we thought maybe the cap hadn’t been screwed on tightly allowing air to leak. We just decided to keep track of it closely.

Tuesday morning we pulled out right on track, just a little after 9. Thankfully it was a really quiet travel day. The traffic wasn’t too bad. We had a 350 mile trip ahead of us, so the day was a little long, but other than that it was a good day. I watched the suspect tire as we were traveling, checking the pressure, but it stayed close in pressure to its neighbors, so all seemed to be clear in that area.

 

It was about 3:30 when we pulled into the Charlotte/Fort Mill KOA. It was a really easy registration as the KOA is connected to the Valero gas station right on the corner.

 

 

The guy checked us in and then led us to our site. Really nice site, and I was wishing we were here for more than one night. (Be careful what you wish for!)

 

So this morning we were planning a late start. Our next trip was only going to be about 140 miles, so we weren’t going to head out until around 11 am. Then our day got derailed! Harry came in to say, I found the tire problem. I followed him out to the truck where I crouched down and looked where he was pointing to see a big screw stuck in our tire! (I wish I had taken a picture but wasn’t thinking about it at the moment for obvious reasons.)

That was the bad news but really there was a lot of good news to accompany it. The best good news was that we were parked and not on the road. It hit me after a few minutes that we had just traveled over 350 miles with a screw in our tire!! Also it was a real positive that we were in an urban area where there were three NTBs just within 10 miles of us. More good news was that we had purchased the road hazard warranty when we got our truck tires last year at Tire Kingdom (which is affiliated with NTB) and so the repair was at no charge.

So all in all, it was a good day for all of the above reasons. We extended our stay here until tomorrow (more good news – we could stay in our spot for another night), and called the place where we were staying next to change our reservation to tomorrow. The truck tire has been fixed and we are enjoying one more night here before we move on tomorrow.