Our not-so-excellent adventures into January

 

So, December went well. Too well, I suppose since I didn’t enter one word into this blog the entire month. Funny how dangerous it can be to step out of your routine.

It was a fun month, though, culminating in our usual multi-cultural holiday festivities in which we open Christmas stockings and presents, and then end the day by lighting the Menorah.

 

         On January 1^st, also as usual, we packed the car and started the annual drive to warmer territory 1,300 miles away.  

   Two hours into New York state, the “Tire Low Pressure” was flashing on the dashboard. As it turned out, this was a portent of what the next two weeks had in store for us.

          Since we always hit the road on New Year’s Day – hoping the rest of the world is hungover and/or sleeping in – our options were limited. If we wanted to change the tire ourselves (pause for laughter at two 70-somethings doing this), we’d first have the delight of emptying everything out of the back, where My Guy’s painting supplies were piled, box after box.

We began by pulling off the highway to try adding some air, but the gas station air pumps either had no working gauges or simply didn’t work at all. After the third station, My Guy suggested I turn the wheel to the side while he perused the tires. Sure enough, a big roofing screw was winking out at us from the front left.

On the plus side, the weather was good and the tire seemed to be holding. We finally found a listing for a tire repair shop that was miraculously open. This took a side trip of well over a half hour through a variety of small towns and over some very winding, twisting roads but we got there. Even more miraculous, they took us right away, plugged the tire, and off we went. We lost almost two hours but as we told ourselves repeatedly, we were lucky, lucky, lucky that it didn’t blow on the four-lane highway at 75 miles an hour.

Ahead of us awaited the next day’s experience of the car train to Florida.