Tire Story

DAY EIGHT (late): We had a bit of an adventure late Friday night. We went to Ukraine Is Not a Brothel pretty late, with Katie, and then went back to the parking garage, just before midnight, and discovered we had a flat tire!  Bummer!  Okay, the tire warning light had gone on the previous day. A tire warning light is new for us with this new Subaru Impreza. We weren't sure just what it meant. We looked at the tires and they all seemed fine. We were pretty pressed for time, trying to see as many films as possible. So we didn't follow up on it. Bad decision!  There we were, midnight, flat tire, empty parking garage. We have AAA, but we weren't sure just how fast they would come at that hour. So - we set about to fix it ourselves. We had to take out a bunch of stuff to access the spare. Of course, we had never changed a tire with this car. So we got out the manual. Where do you put the jack? That sort of thing. It said to block the wheels, and it showed these nice tire blocks. Where are they? No idea. So we used some paperback books as blocks. We got out the wrench to loosen the lug nuts. Boy, were they on tight!  But, by golly, I got them loose. Then we jacked it up. I went to put on the spare donut tire - I was putting it on with the hollow part of the rim inside - and Ellen said, "It goes the other way." That seemed crazy to me, but she showed me the manual. Sure enough, it showed it with the hollow side out. So I put it on that way. It looked funny. Maybe that's the new way - it's been a long time since I've changed a flat!  We let down the jack. put everything back in, started up - wheel wouldn't move. What's going on? I got out and Ellen tried moving the car. "It's rubbing on the brake. I think it's on backwards." We looked at the manual again. Uh, oh. The picture showing the tire with the hollow side out was showing that you were supposed to wipe out the inside of the rim with a cloth before mounting rim. Then it said, "Mount the rim." It didn't  say, "Turn rim around and mount,"  it just said, "Mount." We weren't paying close attention under stress, but it could have been clearer. So we did it all over again!!  That worked, hank goodness. We got home at about 1:15am!   Saturday morning we took it to "Big O Tires" near where the Shays live. It turned out to be a piece of metal in the tire. We had bought a tire there at Big O years ago for the Corolla, so we were in their system. When I went to pay the bill, they said, "No charge." I was amazed and said so. "Oh, we take care of our customers." Now wasn't that nice!