Today is the first vacation day I have taken out of my ten days annual leave. I must make it count! Those were my thoughts as I got out of bed this morning, quickly followed by “S**T we are late, Come on everyone, get up… Zack your bus leaves in 20 minutes”.
After getting little man on the bus and all the jobs done before getting on, we decide to take a nice little journey in the countryside and swing past the car dealership to see if he has the cars title. This is the legal bit of paper to say the car belongs to me. SatNav programmed, fuel in the tank, Katie and Sarah in the car… Let’s go! Rumpha… bula, bula, bula, bula, bula… What the…!
It turns out I have a flat tire. GREAT! Lets swap it with the spare…. It turns out I don’t have a spare… GREAT! We limp to the nearest gas station which luckily is literally two minutes walk from where we live. We crawl along until we finally settle at the air machine. I pop into the shop and get an emergency tire repair kit. $5. I do as the instructions say and fill the tire with the solution in the can. As I do this I watch it trickle out of the tire and go straight down the drain. Well that was $5 well spent! My guardian angel was looking over me as a man who was filling up his Jeep came over to me as he could see I was in a bit of distress. “All you need to do is to jack up the car and we can go to one of those tire places and have it fixed. Your Jack should be in the back here somewhere… HA!.. Well here is your jack but there is no tire iron or handle for the jack… I have one back at my place. I’ll be back in 5 minutes with my jack”. He says as he had his lip out in an all knowing way. What a top bloke!
I wait in the cold waiting for him to return just 5 minutes later.
“I have it but thinking about it I’m not sure how you would get back. The best bet would be if you follow me and I’ll show you the way to the tire place… follow me” he says. We fill the tire as much as possible and see how far we can get before it goes down again… It turns out it was all of 40 yrds.
Off we go… bula, bula, bula, bula, bula… I have never seen my steering column shake as much as this bula, bula, bula, bula, bula… how far can this possible be… bula, bula, bula, bula, bula… cars beeping at me to get out of the way… a 30 car long traffic line quickly builds up behind me…what else could go wrong.
The police seeing this perhaps?
I kind of mouth to the officer through the glass, we are just going to the tire place at the next set of lights. Not that bothered by this they just carry on straight passed me. Phew! That was close. I would hate get stopped by…. Oh s**t! It’s the Sherriff behind me with the all the flashing lights going. GREAT!
Luckily! The man from the gas station who I was following jumped out of his car and spoke to the officer through his window. I calmly wait, watching the whole time looking at my mirror to see if should get of the car. Luckily it was all cool and the man rushed passed my window saying, we are all good…. follow me. Off we go, rumbling along at a smooth 5mph… bula, bula, bula, bula, bula.
I finally get to the tire place and it turns out that not only do have a flat tire, but two of my tires are too big for the car and have the tread just going in to the markers.
Three new tires $230, one new spare tire $76, balance, fitted and the old ones disposed of $10... to have a complete stranger blag two police cars from giving me a ticket for stopping the traffic on the freeway… PRICELESS!
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