Tire Situation

I guess this old dog is slow to learning new tricks.  We are using our daughter's Ford Explorer while they are on vacation with our Saturn.  The Explorer has 224,000 miles on it and I didn't think it would be a good idea to take it on a 3,000 mile trip, so we traded vehicles for a while.

As you may remember we had a flat tire on the Explorer and finally took it to Costco to have it repaired.  Their policy is if you buy it from them, they will fix your flats.  Well, that is close to their policy.  We learned today that if the tire is more than 5 years old they will not repair it under any circumstances.  It has a tiny nail in the tread which is causing the slow leak, but they still will not repair it.  According to them my only option was to purchase a new tire and install it on the Explorer.  NOT!

We drove out of there on the spare and Jack is going to repair the tire himself.  Two local tire dealers wanted $25 to repair the tire and that may still be an option.  I think Costco must be worried about a possible lawsuit if the repair job went bad.  

When we lived in Africa and had a 1 year old car that had a blowout, the repair man had an open charcoal grill with a manual baffle and he vulcanized the tire right in front of us.  He took a piece of tire from another tire and then applied it the our tire and finished the vulcanization process.  I eventually put an inner tube in the tire and drove on it for another 9 years and when we sold the car in Costa Rica the tire was still on the car.  As you can tell, we didn't put a lot of miles on the car in those days, mainly because there weren't a lot of places to drive to at a distance.

We drove down to I-70 to make the trip to Costco and the East bound lane was shut down for 3 hours for an accident.  Everyone shifted over to US Rt 40 to get past the accident.  What a mess.  I continue on to Alt US 40 and took it into Frederick, MD and it was a pleasant drive with almost no traffic.  It is nice to know your way around when these types of problems arise.

We have been watching after Cassie & Jack's cats while they are gone along with two other people helping out.  Cassie's favorite cat is Malibu and she is the friendliest cat and seems to miss having people around. I'm sure Malibu will have a lot to say to Cassie, Jack and Lexa when they return from their trip.  The other two cats are less friendly and don't bother hanging around us at all, but you can see Malibu likes to hang out with Gerry.

That was our day here on the East coast.  Hope you all had a great day.