Yesterday, coming home from work, I stopped at a business on Lincoln Highway for dinner. My car was fine. When I returned home, about 1.5 miles later, my left front tire was nearly flat.
It was about 5:30 p.m. and I had a meeting to get to for 6:00 p.m. So, I swapped the tire for the never-used donut wheel in the trunk of my car. As luck would have it, or the fact that I never checked on that spare since I bought the car, the donut tire was flat as well.
Not really flat — it had and held 20 lbs. of air pressure, but the tire calls for 60 lbs.
So I went looking for an air pump. The gas station north of the tracks doesn’t have one. For some reason I thought there was air at the car wash on North Street, but those devices that look like air pumps are actually air fresheners of some sort.
Left on North Street, north on Orchard Drive, and right on Lincoln Highway, the station at the corner of Rt. 30 and Western does have an air compressor which any of us can use for a mere 50-cents a pop.
I remember when the air was free.
I thought I was finished when I saw that the business had coated the asphalt where the compressor was making the air inaccessible. Luckily, the hose was long enough to reach my car down the sidewalk as I parked next to the building.
By this time, it was close to 6:30 p.m., and drove to my meeting, slowly, on my donut.
My car is hardly the first victim of the obstacle course on Western Avenue. My son lost two tires on two separate occasions so far, one irreperable because of a chunk of metal that ripped into it as he traveled our north-south disaster zone. I’ll take mine to see if it can be repaired later this afternoon.
I’m really looking forward to workers putting the final layer of asphalt on Western Avenue.
