Montana Grandma

Okay, so on Saturday we started out towards Great Falls about 11:15 am to go and look at a pickup and test drive it. It is a beautiful day - finally. We are 60 miles or so from Helena and 28 miles from Great Falls and totally enjoying the beautiful scenery when all of a sudden we hear this really weird noise. We pull over to the side of the freeway and I get out and look at the tires. Yep, you guessed it! This is what I see...

I'm not too stressed because Lynn is with me and he knows how to change flat tires. So he gets all the equipment out to change the tire and we discover that the wrench to take the lug nuts off is not the right size - YIKES - we have never had to change the tire on this car and so we didn't realize that because the previous owner had put custom wheels on, the wrench that comes with the car doesn't work. So there we are in the middle of nowhere in Montana with a flat tire that we cannot change ourselves. Oh boy... Thankfully we are back within range to use our cell phone (just about a mile back we were still out of range - no reception - tender mercy). We get ahold of our daughter to look on her computer and get us the number for the guy we are supposed to meet at 1:00 pm to look at the pickup - it is now 12:30. We call him and explain our situation and he offers to drive the 28 miles to where we are so we can look at the truck. Well, in the meantime we try and find a phone number for a Les Schwab dealer in Great Falls and discover that there is not one there. So we call back to Helena's store to send some road side assistance to us. We are able to figure out where we are by noticing an exit sign number in the southbound lane. We are heading north. I tell Lynn that we need to try and limp slowing up to the next exit which appears to be about 1/2 mile or so in order to get ourselves off the freeway. So we turn the flashers off and low and behold the battery is dead - totally 100% dead! So not only are we stranded with a flat tire but stranded with a dead battery.

The pickup guy arrives around 1:30 - 1:45 and we test drive the pickup and he is kind enough to jump start the car. So we leave the car running now with the flashers on but we have under 1/2 tank of gas. So naturally I was worried that we would run out of gas. Lynn assures me that it will be okay. Les Schwab shows up about 2:15 or so I think and puts the spare tire on in probably under 2 minutes. So now we head back to Helena going the lightening speed of 50 mph. We arrive at Les Schwab to get the tire replaced and put back on but because they are SO slow in this store that takes another hour. But during that hour I had a nice conversation with my mom so it was okay.

So what lessons did I learn on Saturday in the midst of this adventure...

Remember the post when I talked about my dad's gratitude - well I was grateful that day for...