Craptastic Voyage

It rained the entire drive home yesterday. Not just drizzle, but pouring rain. I drove for a while, to give Zach a rest, but he said watching how tense I was while driving was almost as stressful as just driving himself. I'm normally a stress-case anyway, and driving in the rain with the worry of a flat tire didn't improve things, so I only lasted about 2 and a half hours out of what should have been a 13-hour trip. Oh yeah, the flat tire thing; as we left Milan, the flat-tire warning light came on (fancy, I know). It wasn't too low, so we figured it must be a slow leak, aired up, and drove on. I didn't like the uncertainty of such an assumption, but what else can you do in a situation like that?

We were fine for about 10 hours, at which point the warning light came on again. This time, we bought a can of fix-a-flat, did that, and got back on the road. Not 20 minutes later, the light came on again. This time we pulled over at a gas station, and the tire was so low that it didn't even register on the tire gauge. We reconciled ourselves to the fact that we weren't going any farther on that tire (Run-flats are equivalent to a spare--we couldn't go another 200 miles at freeway speeds on it). We called roadside assistance to tow our car to Roanoke where we could expect to wait a day or so for our freakin' super special tire to be special ordered. We were going to have to wait about an hour and a half for the tow truck. Not happy campers. While we were sitting in the car discussing this (in a pleasant and amiable fashion, of course), a middle-aged guy (a local) tapped on the window and asked if it was our rear tire and said he could probably help fix it. We were hesitant to accept his help, but after a while, agreed that we had absolutely nothing else to do for the next hour or so.

He and his friends must have either worked at the gas station or were good friends with the people who did, because they went inside periodically to get cardboard to lay on and dish soap to test the patch with. They helped us identify the leak--which wasn't too hard; once we aired it up, you could hear the air gushing out of the giant hole--and they sent me inside for a $3 patch kit. Then the guy laid on the ground (in the rain) and put the patch in. A couple times, he said if this patch didn't work, he'd run to his house and get his own tools. But in the end, the patch worked, and we made it home (albeit, a few hours later than projected). We were so thankful for this random act of kindness; they insisted it was no trouble, but it meant the difference between us being stuck in Roanoke for the weekend and us getting home that night. Zach got them to take a little money for their trouble, and we're going to send a thank you to Barry's Exxon in Buchanan, VA (exit 162 off I-81, in case you're ever in the area), figuring they'll get it eventually (we didn't even get a name), but it just doesn't seem like enough. I guess the only real way to pay something like that back is to do something similarly nice for someone else in need. Perhaps this was my karmic-repayment for helping a couple friends in need last week. Regardless, my New Year's Resolution for 2008 will be to look for opportunities to help others the way these guys helped us.