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Larmie, WY
From Nebraska, we kept heading west on I-80 through the rest of Nebraska (the same as the first part) and into Wyoming. We were heading towards Laramie, 96 miles from the NE/WY border, to visit Emma and Jesse. Emma is in a Ph.D program at UWyoming and Jesse works at Cold Creek Coffee. This also was the place where we were dropping off Meg for her move to Utah.
The afternoon we got in, we just hung out in E&J’s house. Meg bought some wine and beer, and we had dinner and played cards. On Friday, we went into town to visit the coffee shop, check our e-mail, and visit Emma’s lab. We left town around 2pm.
About 15 miles outside of Laramie on the way to Colorado, the car started pulling sharply to the right. Tess asked me if the car always drove like this, and I followed her gaze to the steering wheel. In order to keep going staight she had to have the wheel turned 30 degrees counter-clockwise. About 1 minute after that, we heard the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of a flat tire.
Tess pulled off the road and turned on the blinkers, while I got out to look at the tire. The car smelled like burning rubber and the right front tire was entirely flat. None of us had ever changed a tire before; luckily the housing for the spare tire has pretty simple instructions. We changed it without too much trouble, just a lot of grease on our hands. At 45 miles an hour, the drive back to Laramie took a while longer than it had on our way out.
None of us had looked too closely at the tire while we were changing it. I just assumed that we could get a new tube and be on our way, like changing a bike tire. When we got to the tire place, the manager pointed out the wearing on only one side of the tire. At one point, it had been worn clean through; I imagine that’s where the tire popped. The other front tire was the same way. When I got new tires and an alignment in Northampton, they’d done a poor job and so the tires were basically running on the inside for the past 3,000 miles. They both needed to be replaced, and my front tires realigned. Luckily for me, both the tires and the labor are still under warranty from the place in Northampton; I hope to be getting my money back for that.
The place we stopped at couldn’t do the realignment until Monday, so we just got new tires and are planning to get the alignment about 200 miles forther on the next day. I’m pretty frustrated about the whole thing, but we’re treating it as part of our cross-country adventure.
