We hit the road on a family trip as soon as the kids were out of school one Friday night before a 3 day weekend. Since I worked from home a lot back then (permanent now) I just fired up the work provided Sprint Cellular card in the laptop and continued to work as my wife drove.

We were about 120 miles away from home and about an hour before my work day was to be over and my wife was taking an off ramp to go from one highway to the next on our journey when an odd sound started. She asked about it and I looked up and saw some grooves cut in the road due to some construction and wrote it off as just being that. She then said "I think we just lost a tire...and there it goes..."

Sure enough our drivers side rear tire went bouncing past our van and the very busy rush hour traffic appeared to part like Moses and his people being chased to the sea's edge. The tire then caught itself perfectly on the median wall between lanes of traffic and followed around this long curve that went around the outskirts of the town the highway was diverting us around. It traveled along the 4-6 inch high curved lip at the bottom of the wall until the tire was out of view to us. My wife who was in the process of beginning her merge when this happened started to pull off to the right shoulder on 3 wheels. As we got completely on the shoulder the back left portion of our 15 passenger van dropped to the pavement and began to drag with sparks flying behind us we slowly came to a stop.

I was on a business call at the time (not on mute) and I had to inform everyone I had to drop the call because our tire fell off. This got a lot of messages and inquiries sent my way after the call...

The rear drum was popped off and torn and worn off. We called insurance to send a tow and then my son and I headed off to find our tire praying it hadn't caused other damage. By my best guess it probably, after the start of the curve cut back across traffic into a field. So we started our walk and about a mile marker later a guy in a construction truck pulled up and told us we weren't safe and we should go back to our vehicle. I informed him what had happened and what we were doing and he said it wasn't even safe for us to walk back so he would give us a ride. If we could see the tire between there and the next turn around we'd stop otherwise we'd have to write it off.

Turns out about another 2.5 miles around the curve from there the concrete median wall had temporary median wall pieces forcing the far left lane of traffic to merge. About 100' from that was our tire. The tire had left a black rubber mark along the lower lip of the median wall all the way up to the temporary wall and then apparently bounced back that 100' and landing on its side. Probably 8 years later and when we drive past this city we can still see the black mark on the wall left by our tire.

We then get towed to a Farm & Fleet and they don't get started right away which was frustrating. They then drive me to Napa auto parts because they don't have stuff in stock. We buy the stuff we needed and go back so they can start to work. We went to eat at Bob Evans which shared a parking lot to spend time. Then a mechanic from Farm & Fleet comes in while we're eating and tells me that the box - while labeled as the correct drums didn't have those drums inside of it. So we have to go back to Napa across town.

We get the part and get back to Farm & Fleet and the manager comes in and says they are closing and can't stay late. She had already started a procedure for their alarm system and couldn't stop it with out approval from corporate and refused to try. So we get kicked out to sit in the parking lot of Farm & Fleet with no vehicle, 9 kids and only what luggage we could grab before we left.

So we start making calls. Thank goodness it was a college town and they had 15 passenger vans with a taxi company that could fit us. We then had to ask the taxi driver for advice on a room. He said he knew a woman that worked the front desk at a motel we could walk back to Farm & Fleet from the next day that may give us a deal. Typically when we show up hotels expect us to rent 2 or more rooms...this can get expensive fast...

The lady was from a large family herself (her words - but it meant 6 kids) and rented us one of their "suites" for the price of a single room. I call it a "suite" because it was obvious that it was formerly 2 motel rooms with the connecting wall removed. This was a huge break. She even brought us items to eat that were part of their continental breakfast to our room. While there she spent some time jumping on the bed with the kids to show them what she used to like to do when she went to a hotel as a kid to drive her parents crazy.

We asked what time their pool closed and she said it was like in 40 minutes. We determined that we hadn't pulled enough luggage for everyone to swim in anyway which was disappointing for the kids. She said that she was the manager on duty and would let us swim 2 hours past pool closing and provided 2 swim diapers for younger kids and even got 1 swim suit out of lost and found for one of the kids to wear. She told the others that t-shirt/shorts would be fine and she would let us use house keeping's dryer for our clothes after we swam.

The next morning we ate breakfast and checked out of our room but stayed at the hotel pool until they called about our van. About a 2 mile walk later we had it paid for and headed back to get everyone at the hotel and continued on the trip to my parents.

Way more expensive than we had anticipated, lots of frustration from Napa and Farm & Fleet, but true luck & blessing to call the cab driver that hooked us up with the nice lady at the motel that really looked after us....


EDIT - reason we had this happen - my wife was running a bunch of errands with a friend (and spending money) that week and trying to keep it from me. While they were out they went down a country road near where someone was taking down a barn or something and they ran over a tire. They came home and removed the tire and took it in to be fixed. They then put the tire back on trying to keep all this from me. They had done a pretty good job with the exception of the fact that they didn't tighten the tires lug nuts sufficiently in the star pattern drawing the tire all the way in before they lowered it so it was on ever so slightly crooked with lug nuts that were not tight....