Travel by Numbers

Some people are numbers people. Some are not.

I’m not usually, but here are a few.

1,992 - the number of miles we drove in the past week. Why? Because I’m sick and tired of the absurd stupidity of air travel these days where we have to take off our shoes and take no more than 3 ounces of liquid to keep safe from threats which don’t really exist. Meanwhile:

90 - the percent of actual bombs and IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) missed at the Denver airport. But we’re safe from Ethan’s juice box. So we drove to Massachusetts instead of flying.

11 - # of hours it took to fly to New England the last time we did it. (2 hour drive to Columbus, wait, fly, layover, wait, fly, wait for baggage, wait for car seat, wait for rental car.)

12 - # of hours it took to drive to Massachusetts on Christmas eve, stopping only for essential gas and bathroom breaks (left at 9pm/arrived 9am)

13 - # of hours it took to drive to Massachusetts, this time, when we stopped to eat.

15 - # of hours it took to drive back to yesterday. Why? Well, stay tuned.

51,446 - # of miles I got out of the original set of tires on my 2003 Chevy Impala. Well… sorta…

51,409 - # of miles I got out of one of the original set of tires on my 2003 Chevy Impala (I got 51,446 miles out of the other 3 at least)

1:30 a.m. - the time we were supposed to get home last night

1:00 a.m. - the time at which one of our tires decided it was not going any further

14 - # of hours I had driven by the time the tire went out

15 - # of years since I’ve changed a tire

So we were driving down Rt 2 in West Virginia, listening to 80s music (and that’s as specific as I’ll be) when all of a sudden it sounded like a plane was going to land on the roof. I turned off the radio and pulled to the side of the road. “I think we have a flat,” I said to Tracey, hoping that I was wrong and had instead just driven over a hobo or something.

There it was, the back passenger-side tire was flat. Not just a little flat. A lot flat. Great, because calling AAA at 1am on a Friday night/Saturday morning seems like such a fun adventure.

I got back in the car just as another car zoomed past at roughly 7,000 miles per hour in a 55 MPH zone. Hrm, maybe I ought to pull the car over a little more. I got back in and pulled ahead about 10 feet.

“Do you want to back up there where there’s more light?” Tracey asked, pointing back about 15-20 feet where there was a small parking lot.

“No, I’m not even sure I should move it this far,” I replied while thinking “Where are we?” I knew we were about 20 miles from Point Pleasant on Route 2, but what about a cross street? AAA always wants to know about a cross street.

“You could ask someone back there,” Tracey said, pointing to a building back near the parking lot. It was then that I realized it was a small bar. I could hear a song about a pickup truck.

So I went in. My eyes began to water. Surgeon General’s Warnings had not made much of an impact on this group.

“Hi, excuse me, I need to call AAA, can you give me some idea of where I am? I know I’m on Route 2 in West Virginia, but I’m not sure about the nearest cross street.”

“Route 33” someone said. We had been on Route 33. It was 10-15 minutes back where we had come. That was the nearest cross-street? Oy.

“What’s the address?” No one seemed to know. Seems the mailing address was a P.O. Box.

“Don’t you have a spare?” someone asked.

I was so road weary that my first thought was “A spare what?” but didn’t say it out loud, sparing at least a little of my dignity.

A few seconds later it dawned on me.

A spare tire? I’ve packed that trunk more times than I can count. I had never noticed a spare or even a place where a spare might go.

Plus, did I mention I had been driving for 14 hours, including some of the most harrowing traffic I’ve ever seen in and around New York City? 1

The last time I changed a tire - the only time I ever changed a tire - I was 18 or 19.

I wandered outside, back towards the car. One of the patrons followed me out.

“Whatcha driving?” he asked. I told him.

“You’ve got to have a spare in there,” he continued, “I can change it for you if you want.”

Just then another car went by at 7,000 MPH.

“…but it’d be better if you’d back it up over there where it’s a bit safer,” he said, pointing where Tracey had suggested I park the car.

I got back in the car and slowly edged it over to the spot. To her vast credit, she refrained from saying that she told me so, when she had, in fact, told me so. She may have thought it, but she didn’t say it.

I opened the trunk which I had packed 14 hours earlier. Back then I had taken great pride in how much stuff I had fit in there so we could leave the back seat open. Any sense of pride had since dribbled away.

Of course, once I got it all unpacked, there was a small dial I recognized as topping off the opening where the spare is stored. I had no doubt seen it a thousand times before but had never really noticed it.

I unscrewed the top, and there was a jack and the “donut” spare tire. I went to lift it out and it didn’t budge. Ugh. Idiot. There’s a bolt holding it in place. My new best friend didn’t snicker. I knew I liked him. I twisted the butterfly wing nut to loosen it a little, then flicked it to get it to spin like I’ve seen the cool kids do. It went nowhere. I went back to turning it in my usual “I-was-a-liberal-arts-major” way.

As he took the tire and the jack, my new found friend said, “I know a lot of people think ‘Oh a bar’ but there’s a lot of good people at a bar,” he said as he reached under the side of the car to place the jack.2 “This time of night, way out here, you’d be waiting probably 4 hours for AAA to show up.”

Other than the inability to breathe, I hadn’t thought anything about it being a bar. Ok, I admit I had wondered how many beverages our roadside mechanic might have had, given that it was 1am on a Friday night and I presume he hadn’t just arrived. But he seemed fine, and clearly more adept at this than I was, regardless of sobriety level.

“I was just thinking two things,” I said, “One: my father must be looking down on me and shaking his head that his son doesn’t remember how to change a tire; and two, I’m thinking of all the places we drove today and could have broken down….”

I went over the list in my head: let’s see we started on 290 in Massachusetts, over to the Mass Pike, then 84 down to New York City, across the bridges, into New Jersey…. well had we broken down there we a) Never would have found someone to voluntarily help us, and b) probably would have been hit and killed by another car. The only people who would have noticed or cared were those who had to fill out paperwork and scrape us off the concrete.

Then there were those looooooong stretches of nothing. We looked for miles and miles to find somewhere to eat. Just before this incident we had stopped so Tracey could go to the bathroom. We had gone at least 30 minutes before we had even seen a gas station. We had travelled roads where the speed limit was 70MPH, and we had travelled roads where 70MPH was the speed that people went only in the far right lanes while everyone else passed them.

Breaking down on Route 2, where the speed limit was 55 (and where I was doing 55), right in front of a place which was a) Well lit, b) occupied by some helpful, friendly folks, and c) off the road enough to change the tire in safety was pretty much the best case scenario for needing to change a tire. Especially considering it wasn’t cold or rainy even snowing (as it was last Saturday night in MA).

Meanwhile, the hero of our story was just about finished taking the tire off. I had been standing there, lost in my head, while he was actually doing something productive. I blame it on 14 hours of driving. Or I’m a doofus. Maybe a little of both.

A few minutes later he was just about finished. I wondered, “Do I offer him something for this?” I was reminded of an email I received awhile ago about traveling in the North and South, which said, in part:

In the South: If you run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a tow chain will be along shortly. Don’t try to help them, just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.

However, this little etiquette lesson came without a guide to tipping. My only other experience like this was when we got our rental car stuck in the sand on Daytona Beach. A guy came along in some sort of monster truck, and pulled us out in about 5-10 minutes. I gave him $10 and he looked at me like I crapped in his hand. Too little? It had only taken a few minutes. Was he insulted by the offer? No idea.

I opened the driver side door and Tracey handed me a $20 bill. Well, she had been right about where I should have moved the car, so I went with her instincts on this.

“There ya go, all set,” said my new best friend, whose name I didn’t even know.

“Thanks. Can I offer you something for your help?” I asked, while handing him the bill and extending my hand.

He took it, didn’t really look at it, nor did he seemed bothered by it, and shook my hand. I’m quite sure he probably wouldn’t have thought anything about it if I hadn’t offered him a thing.

“Name’s Jeff”

“Jeff, I’m Tim. Thanks again for your help.”

And with that we were off, less than 30 minutes after we initially stopped. I drove very slowly home and realized that it was the last spot for miles and miles where we would have found any real live help.

So we left around 11:00 a.m. expecting to be back around midnight/12:30 and finally arrived around 2 a.m.

Long day? Sure, but no one forced me to take off my shoes for a meaningless “security” scan; no one took Ethan’s juicebox as potentially hazardous; and we traveled at our own pace and schedule. And even for what it was, and even if we had been forced to wait for AAA, it could have been much, much worse.

Instead it was just memorable.

The true irony here is that we had just listened to the audio book version of What Would MacGyver Do? where people told stories of actual ingenuity — one used Chex Mix to get her car unstuck from ice, for example.3 Meanwhile, here I was unable to change a tire with a jack and a spare tire. Sorry, MacGyver, I know I’ve let you down. I’ve added your DVDs to my Amazon wishlist to redeem myself.

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Postscript: I called a tire place in town where the guy knew me by name (and I knew him). He told me to come in around 1p.m. and I had four new tires by 1:30, which was almost exactly 12 hours after the original incident. He agreed that 50,000+ miles on the original set of tires was pretty darn good.

This event also reminded Tracey of an adventure that we had in Florida which I relayed to a bunch of friends via email as “Tales of Being TJ episode 4,238” (or some such number) which also involved a tire incident driving back from Orlando to Gainesville, but at least that wasn’t my car, I was just a passenger. I wish I could remember that whole story now, but back then I didn’t have a website to retain these stories.