Serendipity
I had a flat tire yesterday, one big blowout of a flat where the tire literally comes apart. The flat in itself is not remarkable considering the tires on the Rodeo are ancient and need to be replaced. I was waiting until we closed on the house to do that, but the left rear tire decided it didn't want to wait and had to give up the ghost last night. But what was remarkable was how and where it happened. It did not happen while I was driving 60 MPH down Hwy 290. Instead, it popped while I was stopped at a traffic light. Yes, I was completely stopped and not moving and therefore I avoided the risk of rolling the car over on it's roof which sometimes happens with Rodeos when they blow a tire. And it also just happened to occur right next to a very wide median that I could hop on which would provide a perfectly safe place to change a tire. Except that I had no spare tire with me. It was in the carport at Garden Villa and as far as I knew, it was not a usable tire. And all the tire stores I knew of closed at 5:30 or 6:00 pm and here it was already 5:45 pm and I was a long way from any of them. So I called Rob (who was still in North Austin) and asked him to swing by the house and pick up the old spare and bring it to me because maybe, just maybe, we had pulled it off due to a slow leak and it might at least get me to the house. In the meantime, I figured I'd walk over to Wal-Mart and wander around in the air conditioning because damn, it was hot yesterday. On my walk to Wal-mart I looked up and saw that there a tire place in the same shopping center. I figured they were either closed or closing soon, but I might be able to at least find out how much a new tire was going to cost. So I walked over there and discovered they were open until 7:00 pm! That meant I had time for Rob to get there with the spare and I could just get a new tire put on that rim. One small problem though - we had no money for a new tire. However, the tire store just happened to be close enough to my parent's house that my dad could get there in time and front me the money for the new tire. Which is exactly what happened. Rob brought the rim, dad paid for the tire and then Rob, bless him, changed the flat for me. If that tire had gone flat at any other place at any other time, there's no way I could have had a new tire on the car and been back on the road the same night. Simply amazing.