Back to the Coast—or—The Day I Thought We Were Shot by a Sniper

Today's drive was back across the mountains to the Pacific coast.  It was beautiful scenery, but lots of two-lane curvy roads. Fortunately, there were lots of turn-outs so the cars never piled up behind us. The "brake buddy" saved our bacon on the curvy downhills, too. It was a long day, but a beautiful drive.

At about 4 PM, we were about 30 miles East of Highway 101 when I heard a sound like a gunshot. It took a few seconds to realize that we had blown a tire. The RV was still controllable, but we needed to get off of the road, pronto. At the moment of the blowout, we were driving down a steep, curvy, and narrow patch of road. Fortunately, there was a pullout on the other side of the road. I had to take a leap of faith to cross over the oncoming traffic lane—the sharp turn to the right made it impossible to see very far ahead—but we made it to the pullout and stopped. Whew! Everyone was scared, but safe. I got out to inspect the damage. The driver's side front tire had an 8" gash!

Gash!

Now what?  I tried calling Jeff, the RV renter guy who told me to "just call if there's a problem." Guess what...he didn't answer either of his phones. Hmmm. We're on the side of a road with a huge RV and a flat tire and evening is approaching. I called AAA and explained the situation. At the time, I didn't realize that we had a spare tire tucked up under the rig...but I did remember that Jeff had said that he didn't want us trying to change any tires. Yeah--I wasn't about to do that. Rachelle smartly suggested that we put down the leveling legs to get some of the weight off of the tire. That was huge. I was on the phone with AAA for a long time trying to figure all of this out. The closest town with a tow truck that could help us was Crescent City, CA. After about 40 minutes of talking with the AAA guy (who was very friendly and helpful) he told me that a tow truck would be coming out sometime in the next hour. In the meantime, we realized that we were broken down right next to a beautiful river named The Smith River! Keiko and I explored a little bit.

On the Banks of the Smith River

Should We Check it Out?

Keiko on the Rocks

While exploring and waiting for the tow truck to arrive, I received two calls on my cell phone. The first was from the central office of AAA, who wanted to let me know that my roadside assistance didn't include RV problems. Uh, OK, but I still had my family on the side of the road...they told me I would have to pay out of pocket. Yeah. At this point, whatever. I was just happy that everyone was safe and we just wanted out of there. The second phone call was the towing company letting me know that it would cost $350 an hour to deal with us--but they didn't have a driver anyway.... The one bright point was that the tow truck company gave me the phone number for "Les Schwab Tires" in Crescent City. When I called them, it was after 5:00 and only the manager was left in the store. He had one tire left in stock  that would fit our rig and told me that he could come out and replace the tire. Thank God.

The tire company truck was a welcome sight.

Rat-a-tat-tat

Now this is Camping!!

That dude was sweating pretty good by the time he finished wrestling that wheel off of the RV and fitting a new tire. I felt pretty lame just watching, but there wasn't much I could do to help. We followed the manager back to his store to pay the bill—past some of the biggest redwood trees I had ever seen— and he asked me if we had planned to visit the "Trees of Mystery" about 30 minutes to the South. I hadn't heard of such a thing, but he said that his kids loved it and it would be worth the trip. We had planned to head North, but since it was already almost dark, we decided to head South for the night so that we could check out the Trees of Mystery in the morning. Perhaps this whole tire fiasco was just way of getting us to The Trees of Mystery....

The drive along the coast was spectacular. This was the kind of scenery that I had heard about along the northern coast. We spent the night at a place called the Klamath Camper Corral, happy to be safe and secure.

A Bit South of Crescent City, CA