Flattened

Flattened
This one get’s filed under the ‘only in Fort Mac’ category. Caroline rang me last week to let me know that she had a flat tyre (and incidentally, this Americanised spell check doesn’t even recognise tyre as a word, frustrating what?). Having a flat isn’t all that bad of course, but when it’s -26C and you’ve got a car full of other people’s kids, it’s a little worse than normal. Fortunately she was only down the end of our street and so was able to walk home and call the AMA (think RAA, RACQ etc).

Well they show up and then they show up and ask the question, “So where’s the fitting that we need to get the alloy off?”

Hmm, fitting. After market alloy. Wouldn’t it have been nice to know about these things at the time that you buy the car. We certainly didn’t have any fitting. But this is the AMA right, so surely they can get the wheel off? Wrong. So we had the car towed down to the local tyre place where we could have it done for us.

Of course, when they come back and say that the only way that they can get the wheel off will ruin the nuts or the alloy or something … welcome to Fort McMurray. But that’s ok, because they ordered the part that they needed in and would have it in four days.

After four days of course, we were absolutely delighted to discover that the part that they’d ordered was the wrong one and that they now had to order one from Ontario somewhere which would be another 7-10 days. Welcome to Fort McMurray (have these people ever heard of expediting something … air freight? Did someone have to walk the bloody thing across?)

Given that we’d towed the car to the tyre place and that we would have to pay to have it towed anywhere else, we swallowed the bitter pill and simply prayed that they would get it in time for our planned trip to Edmonton on the 31st of January.

In the meantime we juggled our lives with one car. Well until Sunday when we had to all get to the boys ringette. That fourth child makes things a touch difficult around the car situation, but friends were kind enough to lend us their car to get there. And we did.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for getting home again. It was about -40 or something and we pulled up at a set of traffic lights. Everything was good until we drove off again. The car didn’t feel right and it certainly didn’t sound right either. So I pulled to the side of the road. Sure enough … flat tyre. That was a really good time to be told that the people that we’d borrowed the car from had been pumping it up because it was slowly leaking! Enough said.

Now there was a spare, so that isn’t too bad, but I hadn’t dressed to be outside for anything more than about 5 minutes and it takes a lot longer than that to change a tyre. We called the AMA, but they were only taking emergency calls (as Caroline said, four kids stuck in the car is an emergency!) so there was no guarantee how long they would be (after all, it took something like 5 minutes just to get through on the phone).

After assessing our options, like calling a taxi and abandoning the car, I called the guy that we’d borrowed it from. He rugged up and came and helped change the tyre. For that I am extremely thankful, because I stood out there and helped for all of about 5 minutes before I was so cold that I could barely control the shaking. He kept going and I warmed up in his car. There’s nothing macho about toughing it out when hypothermia starts kicking in and there’s a risk of frost bite and all that goes with it.

We got home though and survived. I even managed to warm up after a couple of hours in the house.

And best of all, we will get our car back today! One day before we need it to get to Edmonton … bloody lucky that.