Day 17 -- Missoula to Bozeman, Montana -- 202 Miles

Quite a few things wander across your mind while you're traveling by motor home from here to there: Did I successfully pick up all our gear from the campsite? If we used the crank-up arial for the TV, did we remember to crank it down? Did I lock all the lockers so they won't flap open and dump things all along the highway? Are the water heater and space heater controls in the off position? Did we forget anything when we stopped for groceries? Will the next camp be totally full and we'll have to look elsewhere? That sort of thing.

Even more prominently, the subject of tires is often on my mind. When we bought our first motor home in 2013, I chose to ignore the sage advice I'd been given about never trusting the tires on a used RV. Make sure, the advisor told me, to buy new ones before you take your rig out on the road. To me, the tires looked nearly new so I decided not to worry.

So it didn't come totally unexpectantly when Concetta and I had only traveled a few hundred miles from home, on our very first RV vacation, that the "nearly new" tires that I hadn't replaced began to fail on us.

One of the rear dualie tires started to go flat as we drove east out of Minneapolis on a horribly-crowed, eight-lane Interstate. Fortunately, I could feel it in the steering and was able to exit the Interstate, roll gently down the ramp, and come to rest beneath an overpass before the tire went completely flat.

We immediately called Triple-A, a service we had paid into for some thirty years, only to be told by an impatient young woman that Triple-A did NOT handle motor homes. I pointed out to her that their policy, which we had in front of us, did not back up what she was saying. Unfortunately, the young woman refused to agree, though she was kind enough to call a tow truck company for us. She affirmed, however, that we would have to pay the tow company ourselves.

When the tow truck driver arrived at our shady spot beneath the noisy overpass, he quickly discovered that he did not bring the proper socket for our wheel's large lug nuts. Fortunately, and incredibly, while waiting for the tow truck to arrive, I had discoverd just the right-sized socket for our lugs laying on the ground near the rig. I was more than happy to loan my newly-found socket to the driver.

The next problem we discovered underneath the freeway overpass was that our spare wheel and tire were for the wrong make of truck and did not fit on our rig. When we had purchased the RV, the previous owner had no spare tire and wheel. But being a nice guy, he offered to find us the proper wheel for the rig and have a tire mounted if we would pay for it. Since he was in Lodi, California, and we were Carson City, Nevada, that sounded like a good deal and we said okay. Even now, I choose to believe that the owner probably didn't even know the wrecking yard sold him the wrong wheel. We'll never know.

Fortunately for us, the tow truck driver was willing to remove the new tire from the incorrect wheel and the flat tire from the correct wheel so that he could mount the new tire on the correct wheel. None of this was easy to do using nothing but the tools he carried on his truck.

Once the job was done, the tow truck driver told us that we should return to Minneapolis and get a whole new set of tires for our rig. He even recommended a brand and quality of tire to use, telling us he personally didn't sell tires, but the tire he recommended seemed to be very reliable on motor homes in his experience.

Believe it or not, after staying the night in a local Minneapolis campground, we were on our way into the city to buy new tires when we had a blowout on the right front tire which dropped the right front wheel right down on the ground, bending it and making it useless for mounting a new tire.

I guess that at that point fate decided that it had punished us enough. Even though we were standing beside the Interstate, with loads of traffic screaming by, we were able to find a wheel company in Minneapolis that had two of the correct wheels to sell us, one for the incorrect spare and one for the ruined front wheel, and agreed to scrounge up an old tire to put on one wheel so that we could get to a tire company successfully.

The final part of this drama was played out when the wheel company employee came with our wheels, one bare and one with a mounted used tire. That was great! The only problem was, he had brought a jack that was insufficiently large to lift the truck far enough off the ground to get the old shredded tire and bent wheel off, and the new wheel and tire replaced. Were it not for the fact that we carried shovels with us, making it possible for the wheel guy to dig enough dirt away for the wheel to slide into place, we would have been stuck beside the Interstate for a few more hours while he went to find a better jack.

To make a long story even longer, the next morning we purhased an entire set of six tires for the rig, which certainly put a dent in our vacation budget. Because the tire store had two people out sick, and a huge backlog of work to do, they took the entire day to mount and install our six tires. What an ordeal

And that's why I often worry about tires while we're on the road.

Which brings me to the real subject of this blog entry. Both yesterday and today it appeared to me as though something was amiss with the passenger side dualies. I stood back a couple of times and viewed the tires and finally decided it was just soft ground on that side that made them look low on air. I looked again this morning before leaving Missoula, Montana, but once again decided that perhaps the left side tires looked "flatter" than the right side tires because they were resting on the grass while the left side tires were resting on the gravel. I decided to wait until I could see the truck sitting completely level to decide if I had a problem. It would have been nice to test the tire pressure, but I didn't think I had the proper tool to use on the dualie.

Finally, when we returned to the RV after doing a bit of grocery shopping in the town of Deer Lodge, some miles down the highway from Missoula, I definitely thought something looked wrong. A fellow shopper, in the parking lot at the same time, offered to check the air for me but he didn't have the proper tool, either. Thankfully, he was good enough to direct us to a nearby tire store.

Once we stopped at the tire store, things got a little more complicated. The tire store guy didn't have the proper angled tire pressure guage either, so he went to get his manager involved. The three of us decided that the tire simply needed to come off. The tire guy needed to test for nails or other punctures by immersing the tire in water and watching for bubbles, then make sure both tires on the driver's side had the proper amount of air before replacing them.

Accomplishing this feat of tiresmenship took the better part of an hour, and we discovered that the tires on the passenger side were underinflated by ten or more pounds. Once the outer-most tire had checked out as having no nail, puncture, or loose valve stem, the tire man aired the tire up to the proper seventy pounds and remounted the tire on the rig.

Though it appears that we weren't in any trouble to speak of, I feel better now that the tires have the proper amount of air and I don't have to worry about it quite so much. The incident let me know that I will need to find a tire pressure guage capable of testing the stem on the outer of the dualie wheels if I want to do the job myself. The photo of the rig next to the caboose is where we stopped for lunch in Deer Lodge after leaving the tire store.

This afternoon we managed to find a camp in Bozeman, Montana, and snagged one of their few remaining spaces. The trip here today on the Interstate was not as bad as we had anticipated, since the traffic was exceedingly light and there were't many 18-wheelers to complain about. Part of the reason we traveled to the southeast from Bozeman is that we expected that we'd encounter less snow. Amazingly, there is even more snow in the mountains here than in mountains around Missoula. But tomorrow we head straight south toward the top end of Yellowstone Park. We don't really want to spend any time there, but the northern part of the park provides a short of short cut away from the main attractions and toward the eastern entrance which will save us quite a few miles on our way to warmer climes.

As you can see by the photos, there's lots of snow in these here parts. We stopped to shoot some of the snow as we drove over the 6,368 foot pass between Butte and Bozeman today. The views were absolutely beautiful, but it's darn cold when you get out of the rig. On the Bozeman side of the pass we came across a truck on fire that had backed up traffic on the affected side of the highway for about a mile. We were sure glad not to have run into that bit of bad luck.