Wheel woes

I had a tiny mishap with the car. When I went to pick up my wife from work last friday, all was well.

We didn’t get far from the lot when the ride started to feel a tiny bit bumpy. The roads are filled with snow and ice so I didn’t think too much about it, it’s normal to feel a bit bumpy. Still, I kept following the situation. Once we hit a better cleared patch of road and the ride still felt bumpy, I knew something was off and thus, we pulled over.

Damn, a flat. The time was nearing midnight, it was dark and cold. I didn’t want to damage the car or the rims so we had to leave the car in the parking lot we’d pulled into. Luckily, my parents lived a few minutes walk from where we’d stopped so I popped over, borrowed their car for the night and went home.

The following morning, it’s saturday. All of the tire shops are closed on the weekend it seems and even if I managed to buy a tire, we’d need someone to install it on the old rim. Anyways, the car was parked on an extremely slippery parking lot that was on an not-so-insignificant sideways incline, which also meant that changing the tire there wasn’t an option.

We had to tow.

In my eternal wisdom, I’ve always paid for the second cheapest insurance which comes with 24/7 free roadside assitance, including tows. The third cheapest would’ve also covered arson and moose accidents.

I called up the insurance company and within an hour the tow guy arrives. He agrees that changing into the crappy mini spare tire is a bit hazardous as it’s too slippery to jack the car up. He also happens to know that my local go-to tire shop actually does have on-call service on weekends. So, the car gets towed there.

An hour later I get a call from Janne at Rengasnuora, he happens to have two almost unused fitting tires for 150 €. This is including the weekend on-call service, changing the tires and the price of 'em. Pretty nice considering that a new pair of similar ones would’ve cost me 300 € and normally the changing costs around 50 € in itself. I could’ve also just bought one of the tires but, the other rear tire was about 14 years old at this point and it’s important to have similar tires on both sides of the axle, especially with our winter conditions.

All in all, this whole episode cost me 150 € and took about two hours of my saturday. I expected a lot worse. If you ever happen to find yourself in tire need (hehe) of a set of wheels in central Finland, you should call up Janne. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Oh, the cause of the flat was a screw on the road. Shit happens, I guess.