Location: Missoula KOA, Missoula, Montana

Dates: Aug. 6 to 8, 2017

After changing our tire and riding on our spare, we made it to Missoula just fine. It was only an 85 mile drive. We got set up early in the afternoon at the KOA in Missoula. Our site was very close to the pool (which we never got around to going to) and the office. We even had a separate parking space for the truck.

While the air conditioners cooled off the rig, we ran across the street to Costco to pick up some items there. We relaxed the rest of the evening. Malcolm caught up with some work. We sat outside for a while, though it was somewhat smoky from nearby forest fires, it was pleasant otherwise.

On Monday morning, we decided to try out the breakfast served by the KOA. It was pretty tasty. Malcolm sampled the whole buffet and Val ordered a couple items ala carte.

After breakfast, Malcolm loaded up the spare tire and the flat tire and put them both in the back of the truck. He headed out to a nearby Les Schwab tire store and had them fix the punctured tire and swap it and the nearly new spare tire between the rims. The thought was to use the half-worn and patched tire as the spare from now on and put the nearly new tire into service on the aluminum rim.

While they fixed the tire, Malcolm ran a couple errands including a hair cut. When he hadn’t heard back from the tire store, he stopped by the trailer and picked up Val so we could do some other shopping. The tire store called and we picked up the tires while we were out running the other errands.

Back at the trailer, Malcolm put the regular rim with the formerly spare tire on the trailer and put the spare back in the spare tire carrier. The rest of the evening, Malcolm caught up with some more work and we relaxed inside.

Tuesday morning, we got up and had breakfast at the KOA again. We weren’t in a big hurry since we didn’t have a long drive to Spokane, so we took our time getting ready to hitch up the trailer. When Malcolm checked the tire pressure monitor in the truck, it was beeping about low pressure. He saw that another tire was supposedly at 0 PSI. He checked that tire and it was at normal pressure, so it was the tire monitor that was acting up. We went ahead and hitched up the trailer.

After all our usual checks, Val hopped in the truck and noticed that another trailer tire was showing low pressure – the tire we just had put on. Malcolm checked, and sure enough, it was down to 31 PSI. We ended up having to unhook the trailer and remove the tire to take it back to the tire store. In the process, one of the lug nuts got bent up (they have decorative covers on them) and Malcolm couldn’t remove it with the shallow socket he had on the lug wrench. Off to Lowes to buy a deep well socket (we ended up with an entire set).

With the tire off the trailer, Malcolm drove to the tire store while Val let the office know we needed to stay a little longer (it was already almost checkout time by this time). The tire store prioritized us after Malcolm let them know that we needed to leave soon. They found that we had a cracked rim, so there wasn’t anything we could do immediately. The rims have lifetime warranties (we had to replace another one for the same reason last fall), so we’ll submit a claim to get a replacement, but will have to wait until we get out to the Tacoma area next week.

Back at the trailer, Malcolm mounted the spare tire (the one with the plug from the screw we picked up a couple days earlier) and we said a little prayer before we hit the road.

One More Time

We made it to Spokane just fine later in the afternoon. We’ll update you more on that stop in the next blog entry.