Well that was painful. What with all the construction around here, I guess the inevitable happened: I got a nail in the off-side rear tyre. Bummer. 500 miles from home, need to leave tomorrow, and car is sitting in the hotel car park with a flat.
Managed to limp to the nearest petrol station and get enough air into the thing to make it drivable. My experience with nail punctures like this is that they go down only slowly so the car’s usable for a few hours at least if the tyre has enough air in it.
Used Google to locate the nearest tyre store and plugged it into the Garmin. So far, so good. Alas, I get to the address and, drum-roll please, not a tyre dealer in sight, just houses and a few offices. Bugger.
This all just got trickier, therefore. Here I am, sitting outside some office block, located who-knows-where in Las Vegas, with my laptop back at the hotel, and no plan B. Resorted again to Google – despite their dumping me here in the first place – and sent a SMS search query from my cell phone for Porsche dealers in Las Vegas. Thankfully, one was listed about 10 minutes away, so back to Garmin to get me there.
Made it safely and it’s a pretty up-market dealer - good to see! Problem solved, eh? Well, not so fast ….
Turns out, so the dealer claims at least, that “your particular Continental tyre is no longer made, sir”. On a 911 it’s never advisable to have different tyres anywhere on the thing so net-net is 4 new tyres and a $1,900 charge on the old Am Ex card. What was that posting I did a few weeks back on the costs of running supercars??
Get the car back tomorrow so I can begin the drive home.
Managed to limp to the nearest petrol station and get enough air into the thing to make it drivable. My experience with nail punctures like this is that they go down only slowly so the car’s usable for a few hours at least if the tyre has enough air in it.
Used Google to locate the nearest tyre store and plugged it into the Garmin. So far, so good. Alas, I get to the address and, drum-roll please, not a tyre dealer in sight, just houses and a few offices. Bugger.
This all just got trickier, therefore. Here I am, sitting outside some office block, located who-knows-where in Las Vegas, with my laptop back at the hotel, and no plan B. Resorted again to Google – despite their dumping me here in the first place – and sent a SMS search query from my cell phone for Porsche dealers in Las Vegas. Thankfully, one was listed about 10 minutes away, so back to Garmin to get me there.
Made it safely and it’s a pretty up-market dealer - good to see! Problem solved, eh? Well, not so fast ….
Turns out, so the dealer claims at least, that “your particular Continental tyre is no longer made, sir”. On a 911 it’s never advisable to have different tyres anywhere on the thing so net-net is 4 new tyres and a $1,900 charge on the old Am Ex card. What was that posting I did a few weeks back on the costs of running supercars??
Get the car back tomorrow so I can begin the drive home.
4 comments:
Ouch. Maybe i should buy shares in a tyre company. Michelin or Pirelli? mmmhh
Continental in thsi case, 'cos that's what they had in stock. Found one other problem. Thanks, I'm sure, to running at 125 mph across one of the desert roads I was on, the windscreen surround popped out! It's just a strip of plastic right around the whole windscreen but the top came out and was banging on the roof. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what the noise was!
You can take the windscreen surround 2 ways. Indication of your great driving skill at high speed as you keep control whilst the car disintegrates around you or just poor craftsmanship!
Given that, I'd still have to go for those blokes in Stuttgart having a bad day!
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