Our travel didn’t go exactly as planned yesterday. Instead of traveling a little over half way, we are spending the night about one third of the way between our Washington home and my Montana home town. It isn’t a problem. We’ve covered the remaining distance in a day often before. The drive isn’t really a two day drive to begin with. It more like a day and a half.

We got off to an early start, but a short distance into our trip, there was a severe vibration in the truck’s steering. I pulled over and couldn’t see anything. I started to drive and found that it didn’t occur at speeds under 55 mph. Unfortunately, there had been an accident and the Interstate highway was at a standstill in the direction of our return, so we took a very convoluted route to get around the delay and arrived at the dealership that had done work on the truck a couple of days earlier about an hour later. After the previous expensive maintenance the service advisor remembered me and rushed to get our truck evaluated. Unfortunately they had two service technicians in the truck department that had not yet arrived at work. In order to help us evaluate what to do, the shop foreman took the truck for a short drive and said that he thought the issue was tires out of balance.

The attempt to balance the tires revealed a tire that had been destroyed. Although it was still holding air, a large chunk of tread was missing. Furthermore it would not rotate at all smoothly on the balancer. The missing rubber wasn’t enough to explain the severe out of balance. It turned out that the inside of the tire, including some of the steel bands were coming apart. I must have hit some obstruction on the highway hard enough to destroy the tire. It took a while to find the right tires. A technician worked through his lunch hour to get the new tires mounted and balanced and get us on the road again.

We, however, had packed a lunch for the day, so we didn’t have to delay our lunch. We sat in the comfort of the dealership waiting area and ate our lunch while the work was being finished. Shortly afterward we were on the road with no vibration and a smooth trip for the rest of the afternoon. We stopped for dinner and got a motel room a little after 6 pm.

Despite the delay and the expense of two new tires, our day definitely wasn’t as bad as some people had yesterday. I mentioned earlier the Interstate highway being at a standstill. It turned out that two semi truck had sideswiped on the Interstate, leaving a huge trail of truck parts and the contents of one of the trailers. Law enforcement was forced to close the entire north-bound lanes of the Interstate for over two hours, detouring traffic through city streets between two exits. At times the Interstate was backed up over 10 miles. Somewhere in all of that backup, were the technicians who couldn’t get to work at the dealership. There were a lot of others who were delayed by the accident as well. I don’t know many of their stories, but I’m sure that there were plenty of people who were inconvenienced way more than we were.

A tire that is destroyed by a road hazard is no one’s fault. It might have been covered by our tire warranty, but we bought the tires in South Dakota and there are no dealers of that company anywhere around here. We will purchase two more tires when we get back from this trip and in the end we will be all set with new tires a bit sooner than we expected. And these tires should be good enough that we don’t have to worry about replacing them for another 70,000 or so miles.

I am really grateful for a service advisor who went out of his way to get us going as soon as possible and a technician who worked through his lunch hour to get us on the road. Despite my grumbling about the cost of repairs a couple of days ago, the people who work at the dealership are thoughtful and caring people and the customer service exceeded expectations.

As we drove yesterday afternoon, I was thinking about how much tire technology has changed in the span of my driving years. Our first car was lucky to get 10,000 miles out of a set of tires. Now, I’m disappointed if I don’t get 75,000 miles out of a set of tires. In general a punctured tire can be driven on to the shop. It is truly amazing that this particular tire continued to hold air and allow me to drive after it was so badly damaged. Our pickup now has over 120,000 miles on it and the spare tire has never been used. I have to check it to make sure it has the right air pressure before each trip, but I have never had to change a tire alongside the road in the time we have owned the truck. The same is true of our car. In my first year as a minister, I had to change a tire on my car on the way to church on Easter morning - and I didn’t think anything about it. Times have changed.

Most of all, we are safe and comfortable. We’ve had a good night’s rest and we’ll have no problem making the miles we need to make today. Even with the change in time zones, we’ll be there before the businesses close in town.

I almost never write reviews about any goods or services I receive. Auto repair shops usually hound me to take satisfaction surveys or write reviews. My rationale is that if they charge over $100 for shop rates they should be willing to pay over $100 per hour for a professional writer to write reviews, so I just don’t do it. I broke my rule on yesterday’s service, however. They earned a good review. There is still some excellent customer service in this world and luckily I was able to find it yesterday.