Today was a very long and hot day, but all’s well that ends well, I guess. We started out in the morning along the NJ Turnpike. We both woke up very early, probably due to the noise of the trucks constantly pulling in and out within inches of us. But we did manage to get a little sleep— enough so Joe woke up ready to tackle the tire situation.
Giving it thought overnight, he had come to the conclusion that rather than continue re-inflating the problematic tire, we’d be better off just putting on the spare tire. That was safer and in the end, we’d still have to remove that funky tire to get it checked, so better not to drive on it in the meantime. We had to figure out WHERE to do this tire-change, however…. we were literally inches away from the truck parking slot next to us, and I didn’t want him sitting in the way of 18-wheelers coming in to park. Luckily, someone pulled out just ahead of us, leaving a beautiful curbside space away from most of the rest of the trucks. So we quickly moved our rig to that spot, giving Joe plenty of very safe room to work.
The next couple of hours were just your average “change a tire on your RV” type of experience. We have a compressor and power tools, and we did this last summer, so I knew we could manage. My job, as I’d learned last year, was to turn the crank to lower the spare tire. Joe did the heavier work, including the fight with the lug nuts holding the old tire to the RV. The tire guy had tightened them SO tightly that it was a real problem, but Joe finally prevailed. Luckily, although it was getting later in the morning and the sun was up, the RV cast a shadow on my fearless tire warrior. But he was literally drenched in perspiration when he was finished around 10:30.
We cleaned up and while he rested, I went and got him an iced coffee from the Starbucks in the rest area. Then I drove us to Newark, to Beth’s recommended tire store, and we handed over the leaky tire to be inspected. Meanwhile we made lunch plans with Beth and her visiting friend Rachel (seeing her was an added treat for us.) I also had the chance to walk Cassie in some grass, which she much appreciated.
The tire was returned to us after about an hour— turns out it was not a nail, but a broken valve stem which had been letting the air out. Grand total cost to fix all this aggravation was $31.00.
Just as we pulled out, we discovered some concern about our electric hook-up between the Jeep and the RV. In the end, we detached Joe’s adaptations to the system and went back to the basic hook-up so we could get going—it was already about 4pm by this time. After that, though, life went smoothly— we drove down I-95, turned off north of Baltimore to avoid going through the tunnels, and finally ended up stopping for the night at about 9pm, just over the scary high bridge which separates Maryland from Virginia. We overnighted in the Walmart parking lot, after tiredly eating dinner at Panera.
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