Adventures on a Road Trip
So, Janis and I headed out Monday morning around 9:30, aiming to get to St. Augustine not too long after 10:30 or so.
Wrong.
Along about milepost 143 in North Carolina, a very nice Good Samaritan started waving at Janis in the shotgun seat and shouted that we had a tire going flat. Not too long before, I had remarked on how the car was driving weirdly, like there was a heavy wind, which there wasn’t. We didn’t think much of it because the roads in Richmond are still so torn up from the unusually hard winter that we all need front end alignments (but I, for one, don’t want to spend the money when the roads are still so bad). Anyway, thanks to this lady, we didn’t have a blowout and there was a rest area just a little ways down the road.
And, yes, the tire was looking rather mushy, so I called AAA and. lo and behold, the fixit guy was there maybe twenty minutes after I called and he put on my spare, discovering as he did so that apparently someone had stolen my tools at some point, not a hard thing to do because I haven’t had to use them in years and they’re kept behind a panel where I wouldn’t normally see them. He said the spare should get us to Florida but he didn’t have a lot of air in his little machine so we should stop to get some. Several gas stations later, we were good to go but we checked the air every 50 miles for a bit. And, we finally got to the hotel around 11:30, spending the next half hour lugging the absolute necessities to our room (inconvenient parking, recalcitrant key cards, a gazillion percent humidity, etc.)
Tuesday morning, I found a Goodyear store and spent an hour and a half there. Unfortunately, all four tires have to be replaced due to age and the resultant dry rot—they are, after all, nine years old and tires aren’t meant to last that long, according to the tire guy (gee, do ya think?). Not being able to face all my vacation money swirling around the drain, I bought two new ones and I’ll get the other two when I get back home.
Now, here’s the good news for us book people: while I was waiting, there were six other people coming and going and five of the seven of us had books, the real kind printed on paper. This is Florida, so three of those readers were seniors but one wasn’t.  I couldn’t help smiling at this small sign that p-books haven’t died yet.
July 21, 2010
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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