September 2015
The exciting adventure continues! Will Superman get there in time? Will Lassie’s arbitrary barks be understood with pinpoint GPS accuracy? Will Will Smith will Will in his will??? I don’t know. I don’t write for them, but I do write about our travels around the country, and the month of September was full of things. I would say interesting things, but I can’t tell you what’s interesting. You’re just going to have to read to find out.
Too Tired…Try Six Tires.
Natalie woke me one morning early in the month to tell me about an article she had read from Interstellar Orchard. This article to be exact: RV Tires and More Yellowstone. (NOTE: I’m aware that it is easy to get lost in reading the blog I just linked to. I only ask that when you are done reading about Becky’s exciting life you return here so I may finish the intricacies of my possibly mundane September.)
The article talks about the fact that RVs, like all vehicles, need new tires from time to time. However, RV tires spend a lot of their time sitting around, so they tend to rot before they wear 
out, which means you may be changing RV tires before you have a lot of miles on them. This got us thinking. We bought Starbuck used. We had no clue as to how long she sat and in what conditions. She is only 4 years old, but the tires on her were original and they were 5 years old according to the date stamp. We took a trip outside to look at them ourselves.
They seemed in good condition at first, but then we noticed some cracking and signs of wear. We would be taking a 1,800 mile trip to Texas soon and tire problems were not something we wanted to worry about so the decision was made to get new ones.
We called up Percell Tires which have a shop in Fernley; they were very nice and told us they would order the tires. We made an appointment. Upon further digging we thought it would be a good idea to get the alignment done when we got the tires and oil change done. Unfortunately, this Percell doesn’t do alignments on large vehicles. They put us in contact with their shop in Reno which does this.
Now our plan was to get the tires and oil change in Fernley, and then go to Reno to get an alignment. That sounded like a wonderful, exhausting plan except the Fernley guys told us that they would take all day to do the tires and the oil change so we would want to get the alignment the next day. (sigh)
Keep in mind that we have to put three cats and a mid-sized dog in a Toyota Yaris for an 
extended amount of time each time we have something done. The pets tolerate this for one day, but they have informed us that they will go on strike if we attempted this stunt two days in a row. We even caught Sammie with large black markers and poster board.
The easiest solution to the issue was to have everything done in Reno to which the Reno shop said the tasks could easily be completed in one day. The hangup, however, was that the Fernley shop ordered and received our special order tires and they couldn’t just transfer them to the Reno shop since it was not just an inventory shuffle.
All of us in the car
The solution was to pay for the tires at Fernley; the Reno shop would pick them up and transport them to Reno. We decided to make a trip of it and took Starbuck to a rest stop about a quarter of the way to Reno in order to get away from the RV park for a bit and change the scenery.
The next day we dropped our home off at Percell in Reno and put the pets in the “Blueberry” (Yaris). I must admit we were very happy with Percell’s service; they finished all of the work within the time frame they said they would and we were happy with our new tires, oil, and alignment. $2000 dollars later we were back at Desert Rose RV Park.
While the tire saga was happening, we got an email from Amazon telling us our start date would be October 14th. Originally we told them our earliest available date was October 25th. We were scheduled to be at Desert Rose RV Park until October 15th, so we called up the owner of the park who was very understanding and we changed our last day to October 3rd. Our arrival to Texas would come sooner than we thought.
The lesson of the month: Tires are expensive… I don’t have anything funny to add.
