Tires rot from the inside out? Really? Nobody seems to tell first time RVers this type of information. We kept our fifth wheel on our lot at Cedar Blue in Sulphur but did not have a cover over it. Nor did we have covers on the tires. So the sun and weather had their way with the the tires for some time. These things cause the tires to rot from the inside out. The silent killer so to speak as the tread looks great so you don't realize the tires are not in good shape.
We headed off for a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe and then
home. All went well until the day we were
heading home from Santa Fe. I was driving
and shortly after getting onto Interstate 40 heading east to Oklahoma I heard
what sounded like a shotgun blast. Thankfully I didn't have any problem steering
and pulled over immediately. Lo and
behold, we had blown a tire on the RV.
I had to admit, at that point I totally lost it and broke down in
tears. Of course John is cool as a cucumber. He came prepared and out came a
hydraulic jack. Wow – where did he get
that? I pulled it together as I could
see that John was working his way through this problem without any problem. In about 15 minutes we had that tire
changed! Wow how awesome was that. Of course now we are on the
spare and have no other spare. When we were finally headed down the road, the discussion went to where are we going to get
another spare? We at least realized that
the RV had to have RV tires and we weren't going to find those just anywhere. Add to the problem that it was Sunday and we realize we may not find
anything open. So the plan was to stop in Amarillo for the night if
necessary. I don’t think we drove more
than 10 miles and there on the side of the road is a tire center for trucks and
it is open. We pulled off and, you
guessed it, they had one RV tire in stock to fit our unit. What a blessing.
After getting the spare put on a wheel we were again headed toward home
base – Sulphur, OK. We traveled the majority of the way home without any further problems until five miles
north of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma - BANG, there went another tire. And again, in just a few minutes we had it
changed. Of course, now we are out of
spare tires and have another 45 minutes of driving. Decisions decisions – do we keep going or
not? Remember, it was Sunday and early evening. Being so close to home base, we
decided to take our chances and off we went.
We arrived safely and with no more blown tires.
From that point forward we knew to carry an extra RV tire in the truck bed as well as
the spare that was on a wheel. Oh yes - and our big hydraulic jack!
Our next big trip was to Disney World and we still had a couple of tires on the RV that had good tread and had not blown so we made the stupid decision to run them until they weren't good. Wow how dumb was that. Not only did we take a chance on hurting the RV but hurting others on the road. What lead to the decision we made was that each time we blew a tire it was just a big bang, no steering problems and no damage so what could it hurt? God was with us on that trip. We had two good spares, one on a wheel and one in the truck bed. We too two and half days to get to our destination and both evenings on the road about dinner time we blew a tire and just around the corner was a Walmart. So we would change the tire and then have Walmart mount a new tire on a wheel. When we arrived in Orlando we were out of spares but had all good rubber on the ground. We did purchase two more spares before heading home but had no need for them, thank goodness.
Now that we are in a large motorhome and cannot change those big hoggers ourselves, we have them checked out before we hit the road for wear and proper air pressure. Oh yes - those big tires cost about $400 each and we have six of them so yes, we have a tire budget that is setup to buy new tires about every five years.
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