One leftover from Thursday night. We had planned on making dinner at the RV but by the time we got back it was getting late so we decided to do the take out menu at Crockett's. The food was great and saved us some time and less of a mess to clean up the night before we were leaving.
Friday: Departure day.
The Plan: The plan was to leave around 7:30am and drive to "The Swamp" rest stop in Louisiana unless we were making good time, in which case we would drive straight through
Plans change....
We ended up leaving pretty close to the planned time and did not have any problems checking out. I did however take a wrong turn heading out and ended up going down some back roads increasing our time to get to the highway. No big deal we were off and on the road. A little less than 2 hours in a tire lets go.... Fortunately it was a rear tire(Duals) and other than the loud boom you could not even tell the tire blew. A little nervousness as we took the first exit off the freeway and pulled into an abandoned gas station and took a look. Drivers side inner rear tire blew out the sidewall..almost a perfect hole. The tire never separated so everything was in good working order. Now the problem. We are in what appears to be a pretty remote town and we have to find a tire or get towed to a tire center(Some of you may know that cost..) Well first off is get a hold of the tire warranty people to get a claim started. My wife gets on the phone with the warranty company(not a fast process) while I go next door to an Auto Repair/Wrecker company to see if they know where the closest tire shop may be that carries RV tires.(They actually had an RV in the shop they were working on). The gentlemen I spoke to said the were no close tire shops(Verified by my google search). He did say that occasionally they change a locals RV tires and he remembered having some extras. We went to the back where he had a couple of tire racks and found the two tires he was looking for. Unfortunately they were the wrong size..... Now for the good part. He noticed another tire on the rack(only 1) that looked like an RV tire. We pulled it down and what do you know it's the right size.. : ) Now it gets a little complicated. The first thing I notice is the brand.."Summit". I personally have never heard of it. Well I know the warranty company has to approve any tires you put on. I did look at the ratings, load info, etc on the tire and it met and mostly exceeded the Good Years ratings. I don't like to skimp on tires so I was a little hesitant to even want to put this tire on. With that said I have had terrible luck with Good Year RV tires and I know others love them but my personal experience has not been great so I decided to do a little more research on the Summit tire after we notified the warranty company to check for approval on this tire. The warranty company and myself could not find much information on the tire and they said they would keep looking and call us back. In the mean time I kept looking and was able to find a little more info out about the tire as well as RV'ers who were running these tires. This made me marginally feel better. While looking through my phone I was pacing around and started noticing all the Wreckers(big and small) had Summit tires as well as the RV they were working on. It just so happens the owner of the RV had pulled up a short time ago to check on his Rig. I asked him about the tires and he said he started running them 10 years ago because they were cheap but also that he never has had a blow out with them. Obviously his experience could greatly vary from mine but my confidence grew a little that this tire could get us home. He also said he just returned from a 3,600 mile round trip on them...I only needed to get 900 out of it. Well I decided that I was okay with the tire going on now for the warranty approval. An hour later they called back. They never found "enough" information on the tire but because of the ratings of the tire the Supervisor approved it!!! Now to change the tire...
Did I mention this was a small place... They did not have a tire change/removal machine for this size tire so it was removed/installed manually... Oh boy. They struggled getting the new tire on and an hour later they got it on and installed it.
Then came time to pay. Did I mention this was a small place. The only person(s) who could ring me up (Husband and wife) had just gone to lunch while they were wrestling with the tire. So we sat another hour until they returned for a 2 minute transaction... : (. Through all that I was not very upset but more relieved that the blow out happened when it did, we exited safely and just so happened to find a tire at this small shop we pulled next to.
3-1/2 hours later we were back on the road!!
The rest of the trip went fairly well and never heard a peep from the new tire. We decided with our new travel time that we would stop at the rest stop at the Mississippi/Louisiana border for the night. We somehow ended up with a lot of black tank storage so we needed to dump while we were there. The rains moved in through the night while we were there and gone when we got up around 6am to leave. The problem is when I pulled up to the dump station in the morning the whole area was under water. So Plan B was to hit a dump station on the way home. That never happened and we still need to dump which will now have to wait until this weekend...
Overall the entire trip was great and we cannot wait to do it again. Hopefully by this weekend we will have some of the other camera pictures loaded and ready to post.
A welcome site...
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