A Screw in the Tire

    We make the 135 mile (217 km) drive up to Prince George about once a month to restock needed supplies.  During the winter, we carefully watch the weather to pick a safe day for the drive.   Yesterday was the day we chose.  The weather forecast didn’t look bad, just a 30% chance of snow flurries,  but just out of McBride we ran into a snowstorm, a near “whiteout” where you could hardly make out where the highway was.  Fortunately, we only had snow for about 1/3 of the trip, then things cleared up.

    Once at PG we began ticking off all the things we had on our list.  We drove to the fabric store so Joan could get the material she needed for her quilt.  That done, we dropped off a quilt belonging to an acquaintance in McBride, at the quilt place where she wanted it delivered.  Great, we were making good time ticking off the chores.

    Then we drove to Costco and when I was filling up at the gas pumps, I happened to look down at my tire and noticed a screw sticking out of the side of it.  The tire was still inflated, so I timidly touched the screw to see if I could determine how deep it had gone into the wall of the tire.  It seemed to be in pretty deep.  When I moved the screw a bit to one side, a few little bubbles of air were released, so it had penetrated deep enough to cause me trouble.

    Fortunately, Costco has a tire department, so I drove over there and had the woman technician take a look at it.  She gave me the bad news--since the screw was in the sidewall of the tire, the tire couldn’t be repaired and would have to be replaced.  She told me that Costco was completely out of snow tires, so that created a problem.

    The spare tire in the car was one of those Mickey Mouse small temporary tires.  I thought about the prospect of having to drive all the way back to McBride on a snowy highway on the small replacement tire, then once back home, having to immediately take off all the winter tires and put on my 4 summer tires, a bit early in the season.  That didn’t seem like a good solution.

    As we ate lunch in Costco and I continued to mull over the problem and I remembered that I had bought those snow tires at Subaru, when we bought the car.  I called them and luckily, they still had one of the same tires in stock and they could slot us in to get it put on.

    We felt so lucky to be able to get the tire replaced in a timely manner, and although it was an “unscheduled” deviation from our Prince George shopping list, it all worked out in the end and we still had enough time to complete all the other things that we wanted to get done.

You can view my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca