This weekend I needed to pick up an interesting restomod Power Wagon from Wilmington for a review, so I figured I’d take the kid and we’d make a fun day of it. The plan was to take a car there, drop it off, take the Power Wagon back, and then pick up the car later. The car I picked for the trip there was the remarkable $500 2005 Toyota Sienna we’ve written about before, because that car has the most reliable air conditioning out of all the cars in my ragtag fleet.What I didn’t pay much attention to were the tires, which were good, though one of them had one small issue: the sidewall disintegrated. But that was the only issue with it! Just one tiny problem!
Yes, as you can see from the top photo, that tire pretty dramatically ended its rich, engaging tire life on the side of the I-40 East. I thought, oh well, I’ll put on the spare and keep going, which is when I realized the AWD version of the Sienna has no spare, because they needed the room taken by the spare for the hardware to drive that rear axle. Well, crap.
So, my kid and I were pretty boned. I called AAA, who found a tire shop they could tow me to, at some expense, so arrangements were made and I waited. And waited. And waited.
One of the nice things about a minivan is that it’s a little mobile room, which is much better to wait around in by the side of the road, if you have to wait around by the side of a road. But after a couple hours, it’s still not great.
After checking in with AAA repeatedly, I learned that, guess what, ha ha, the tow truck wasn’t actually contacted, and no one was actually coming to help, and AAA is quite sorry and that’s not normally how they do business, except for this time, when yes, that’s how they did business. By not doing business.
That’s about when I realized I reached out to the wrong set of three initials. AAA isn’t the answer when SWG is right there, around Wilmington! Yes, SWG, Stephen Walter Gossin, our man who spends his time rescuing needy cars and, in more than one case, people. This time I was a very needy people in need of rescue, so I reached out to SWG and thankfully he realized he had some old Hyundai wheels sitting around that had the same bolt pattern as the Sienna.
He drove over an hour to get to my stranded ass by the side of the road, and within minutes we had the Korean wheel on the Japanese car and all was right again in the world. What a pal that SWG is!
By the way, this is the vehicle I’ll be reviewing. It’s gleefully bonkers:
More on that thing soon. But first, I should acknowledge the real victim of all, this, my kid Otto.
Otto told me that he sort of expected this, as things always seem to go wrong when he and I take some sort of road trip adventure. And I wish I could say he was wrong! Immediately I remembered the saga of the pickup truck David got for me, The Marshal, a 1989 Ford F-150 that proved to be a colossal ordeal to get home, thanks to some bad luck with alternators and batteries.
That was barely two years ago and Otto was so much smaller! Look at him:
Man, I don’t think parents get enough warning about just how dizzyingly fast kids grow up. It’s hard to wrap my mind around.
Then Otto reminded me of the time we went to the zoo in my Yugo, a drive of a couple hours that stretched to many hours on the way home because the shift linkage disintegrated, forcing me to fix it with two hose clamps and a rock:
(Two weeks from now)
"Oh good, the Yugo's parts are here."
(Opens box, takes out two hose clamps and a rock.)
— Peter (@Peter_M_V) November 27, 2021
So, okay, Otto has a point. My track record for not having something happen that causes us to be stuck places for hours isn’t great.
But that’s part of the adventure, right? Right?
Anyway, I’m very thankful for SWG and I’ll try and keep a better eye on my tires. I hope.
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