"Dad, there's black stuff flying off the camper."
Maya said it calmly, the way she says most things, at 11:25 on Sunday, June 14, on I-75 a few miles south of Tifton, Georgia. A second later I heard it too, a slapping thump from behind us, and felt the Pilot give a small tug to the right. In the mirror, the camper's passenger-side tire was coming apart in strips.
That was day two of our summer loop. We'd left Ron and Linda's driveway in Ocala at 8:10 that morning with about seven and a half hours of driving to Vogel State Park ahead of us. It was the one long day on Dana's planning note. It got longer.
The first ten minutes
I put the hazards on, eased off the gas and stayed off the brakes as much as I could. An exit was about half a mile ahead, so I crept along the shoulder at 20 mph and pulled into the wide lot of a gas station at the top of the ramp. I don't know if that was right for the rim. Standing on the shoulder of I-75 with two kids while trucks went by at 75 felt worse.
The tire wasn't flat. It was gone: a few ribbons of rubber hanging off the rim, the rest of it somewhere back on the interstate. The rim looked okay. The fender had black scuffs where a flap of tread had beaten against it, and the whole side of the camper smelled like hot rubber.
The spare we never checked
Fine, I thought. We have a spare. It rides on a bracket on the front of the camper under a vinyl cover, and in four and a half months I had never once taken that cover off. When I did, I found a tire with fine cracks all over the sidewall, like a dry creek bed. The tread looked almost new. The rubber was not. The four-digit date code on the sidewall, which I learned to read about an hour later, said it was made in 2011.
In February we put two new tires on the camper, and we went over the bearings, the hitch, the lights, the battery and the propane tank. The spare was on a list somewhere in my head, below all of those, and it never made it onto paper. I'm not going to dress that up. I didn't check it.
Dana didn't say a word about the spare. She just handed me the AAA card out of the glove box, where it lives tucked inside the trip log.
Roadside help and a tire shop open on a Sunday
We'd upgraded to AAA Plus RV in February for $92 a year more, so one membership covers the camper and both cars. I called from the gas station lot. The dispatcher asked whether the camper could be driven on the spare (no), whether anyone was hurt (no) and where we were. She found a tire shop about 9 miles away that was open on Sunday and said a truck would be there in about an hour.
It was 70 minutes. We spent them inside the gas station, which had air conditioning, a snack aisle and a clean bathroom, and which I now think of fondly. Nico, who had been asleep since somewhere around Lake City, woke up to the news and was thrilled. Maya drew the shredded tire in her nature journal, which was not how I pictured her first entry of the summer.
The driver backed a flatbed up to the camper, winched it on and strapped it down in about 15 minutes, and we followed him to the shop. The tow cost us $0. I didn't ask what it would have cost without the membership. I didn't want to know.
The shop had our size in stock. While they mounted the new tire, the mechanic dug through what was left of the old one and held up a drywall screw still stuck in a chunk of tread. Nico asked if he could keep it. It's in the glove box now, next to the trip log. They put a new tire on the spare rim too: two tires, mounted and balanced, $241. The mechanic also spun the hub, checked the bearing and said whoever packed it did a nice job. I called Rafael that night to tell him.
Three hours, and what we do now
We were back on I-75 at 2:30, about three hours after Maya's announcement. Atlanta on a Sunday afternoon was slow, the last hour into the mountains was dark, and we pulled into Vogel at 9:40 p.m. We set up by headlamp and ate the sandwiches Linda had packed "just in case." She is never going to let that go, and she shouldn't.
What we do now:
- Check the spare before every trip: pressure, cracks and the date code.
- Put the gauge on both camper tires at every fuel stop, not just a hand on the tread to feel for heat.
- Keep the roadside card with the trip log, where Dana can find it in ten seconds.
There's a new line on the list taped inside the camper door, in Dana's handwriting, right under "Pressure checked on both camper tires." It says "AND THE SPARE," in capital letters, the same way she wrote Nico's shoes.
