DAY 193, 251 days to go!

Big problems seem to always occur when we are miles away from services. It’s like unspoken karma for RVers or something. We knew we had a back tire tire problem… We sprung our fist leak while in Newfoundland. Thankfully my handy eagle scout husband carries a patch kit and has no fear of patching a tire on this 40,000 pound beast. The same tire sprang a different leak as we left mainland Florida for the Keys. My husband might have driven on one of those “wife told you so” roads… Thankfully we managed to make it to our Key Largo campsite. It was time for a new tire. We started dialing. Per local businesses, there were no replacement tires within 2 hours of us and our best bet was to start calling further up in Mainland Florida. Well, it worked the first time, so Rob dutifully patched the tire again and we prayed that it would last the next few weeks that we were on the Islands until we could get back to mainland.  And.. we set off on our 2-hour drive for Key West for Christmas.

Beautiful drive but take note, there are no shoulders on these bridges!

About an hour into the drive, KABOOM! Whop, whop, whop, whop, whop…. it scared us all to death. Thankfully Rob was driving because I jumped so far out of my seat! As I heard the repetitive “whops” i started praying out loud. “Please God, no RV damage, please, please God, no damage.”   Damage to your RV has the potential to put you out of commission for weeks, sometimes longer, while you await repair. And its two days before Christmas!!

Thankfully we had just got off the bridge and there was just enough shoulder on the highway for  us to pull over (you never pull a 40,000 vehicle over on a soft shoulder!). Rob jumped out to survey the damage. Tire was completely shredded. The tire shred had grabbed the mud flap and pulled it up and over the tire, bending it the wrong way….. The shred had cracked the undercarriage compartment and dismantled the wiring for our tire pressure system. But no body damage. Phew. All in all, we were pretty darn lucky.

Rob uses a 2×4 to unbend the mud flap from around the tire!

We started dialing for tires… we figured our best bet was to find a tire on the mainland and send Rob or me back 3-hours to retrieve it and bring it out to the islands. Long story short, we never did locate the right replacement tire. Instead, we found a mobile semi truck repair company that had another brand, just slightly bigger – and we decided to put it on and try and make it to our Christmas destination.

The tire guy was the sweetest person and not too mention, a sight for sore eyes for my girls! 🙂

We made it to Key West and the whole ordeal took only 3 hours!