the never-ending tire saga

About 3 months ago, I went to Yosemite with a bunch of friends. As I mentioned previously, I took a nail in my left front tire, and had to get it patched at the Yosemite Garage.

More recently, I noticed that my tire seemed to have sprung a slow leak. I had to fill up my tires about every two weeks, and then every week, and then every few days. At that point I started to look into getting new tires.

The Tire Rack was highly recommended by several, so I browsed around and found that Michelin was offering a $50 rebate on a set of four tires. Michelin makes a very nice Ultra High Performance All-Season tire called the Pilot Sport A/S. However, at $135 a tire, they were significantly more expensive than my other choice, Pirelli's PZero Nero M&S, at $101 a tire. I waffled for a couple of days, and managed to forget completely that the rebate was expiring at the end of the week.

The following Monday, I was all ready to buy, so I clicked rapidly through the checkout process until I discovered the rebate had expired. I sulked for about a week, not wanting to admit defeat. It's horrible when you lose money due to your own laziness. I kept thinking if I waited long enough I would discover another coupon or rebate. Finally, last Sunday, I caved to reason and bought the tires.

Monday evening, on my way home, I took a nail in my left front tire. My new tires arrived Tuesday afternoon. If I had gotten the tires with the rebate three weeks previously, I would have just been out $135. I guess the moral of the story is that procrastination pays? Maybe a better moral is that lots of times, things just work themselves out, in the end.

As an aside, it really kicks ass to live just minutes away from work. Tuesday morning, I called up a co-worker at 10am and he swung by and picked me up on his way to work. That afternoon, I convinced another co-worker to come by and talk me through putting on the spare. Last time I had a flat, a bunch of guys did all the work, so I wanted to make sure I learned how to do it this time. I figure if I know how to change a flat, maybe I won't get one.

Yosemite photos

Here are a few of the photos I took last weekend at Yosemite:

Yosemite has a garage

We went to Yosemite over the weekend. We hiked Yosemite Falls, which was pretty killer on the legs. I'm glad we didn't decide to hike Half Dome.

Anyway, my car took a nail at the end of the first day, but we didn't notice until we were leaving our hostel (the Yosemite Bug) on the second day. Actually, we didn't notice at all, because the roads all around the hostel were these nasty, rocky, dirt roads. I could have been driving on four flats and not noticed. Some nice people staying at the hostel flagged us down and pointed out the flat.

We were pretty worried since it was a Sunday morning and we were about 50 miles from Merced, the nearest thing resembling a real town. Finally the hostel people said there was a garage in Yosemite Valley, so we decided to just drive on the spare into the valley and hope for the best.

It turns out that the Yosemite Garage is very, very well-equipped (three lifts!), and open seven days a week. When we got there, we were told that there were four other flats in front of us, but they'd be done in about an hour. Oh yeah, and the charge was $13. Last year when I got a flat in the Bay Area, it cost me $20. Amazing.