A Very Expensive Drive to Salt Lake City, Utah

Beautiful sunny morning to pack up for our drive to Salt Lake City. We wake up early and get an early start, which is good since we plan to drive 300 miles today.

The scenery to the interstate is nice, but once we're on the interstate not much to see.

We stop for gas and Jere goes to check the tires and the gas station attendant says our one tire is in bad shape. Jere looks at it and decides the tire is fine...the guy just wants to sell us a tire (there's a tire shop at the gas station). So no problem. We get back on the interstate. About 100 miles down the road we stop at a rest stop to grab some lunch and a guy on a golf cart stops Jere and says our one tire is coming apart at the treads (same tire the other guy mentioned). He says that if we bring the trailer over to the garage they will switch out our bad tire with spare tire for free. Well, nothing is ever free so we're a little hesitant but say okay and drive the trailer over to the garage. This is when things go downhill...

The tire garage worker says that 3 out of 4 tires are coming apart at the treads. He shows us and they are indeed coming apart at the tread. He explains how heavy 5th wheel trailers need stronger tires than are normally put on the units by the manufacturers. Now our tires aren't that old (2 we put on on during our trip home from Alaska last year and then two new tires before we started this trip) so we are looking at each other trying to figure out if this is a scam or if this guy is being truthful with us. Everything he says makes sense and something is definately wrong since there is a large crack between the treads of 3 of our tires. He says they often see problems with trailers out here in the heat.

Bottom line: we buy 4 new heavy duty tires. $1000 that is not in the budget. Ugghhh. These Utah rest stops have quite a racket going on by looking at trailer tires, but we do not want a blow-out so hopefully the guy is being truthful and at least we avoided a blow out on the road.

We drive to Salt Lake City with 4 brand new tires, do some research online to see if we bought the right tires, set up camp, and go swimming to release some tension.