Friday the 13th

Thursday night started peacefully but about 2am a storm came in and it rained for about 3 hours. An angry rain. So we got up around 8 and it took us a couple hours to pack up - and much of the stuff was soaked through. We got on the road around 10:30 and our next destination was St. George Island, Florida where we are meeting my mom's side of the family (about 50 of them) to stay on the island for a week. Our goal for friday was to get to south georgia so that the drive to St. George Island Saturday was short.

We got out of the mountains and around Atlanta then down through Columbus without any issue. Right as we started looking for a place to set up the tent, a storm cloud appeared in the west and came overhead and started raining. It was about 5 pm so we decided to keep driving - and if the rain kept up then we were going to pop for a hotel. We drove around Blakely in the rain and as we came up to a stop we heard a noise under the element then felt something wrong with how it was driving. I pulled over and got out to look (again, in a pretty steady rain). Right as I got out, I could hear a hissing sound. I walked around to the back right tire and the hissing grew louder. It had only been 90 seconds and the tire was visibly deflated. I looked up a service station on the garmin and it was only 1.1 miles away, so we drove back into blakely and made it to a service station that sold tires.

The fellas there took a look at it and pulled out a massive peice of steel. The tire was unsalvageable and he didn't have the right size tires for the element. So they plugged it for $15 and we drove 40 miles to the Bainbridge walmart and replaced the back tires for $250. There is good news in all of this. The first is that I replaced two tires about a month ago and moved the new ones to the front so the tire that was destroyed had about 41,000 miles on it. Now all our tires are the same age. The second piece of good news is that our president George Herbert Walker Bush had wired $600 to Christine's bank account yesterday morning so he paid for our tires.....kind of. In order to avoid further friday the 13th action, we got a hotel across from the Walmart and ordered a pizza. The hotel had a perfect motivational picture next to the door that reflected the lesson we learned - it takes teamwork between Bob, Christine, Dee and GW to get the tire fixed and stay the course.