Today I didn't get a flat tire.

We were in Birmingham for my boys' swim meet (in which they each dropped many seconds over four events–yay!). Afterward, on the hunt for grass-fed beef–trying something new, joke away Rich–we decided to stop at Whole Foods. Haven't been to that pricey place in ages, but we stuck the cow and a few other things in a cooler with ice and were on our way out of the parking lot when the ominous thump, thump started.

But my flat tire indicator wasn't lit. Weird. We pulled over to check it out and this is what we found. My not flat tire. (Apologies to my Twitter friends who've already seen this.) 😉

Flat or not, we weren't about to drive 80+ miles on it. Nor on the spare.

Thanks to modern technology (iPhone) I found a tire place while my husband put on the spare. Two l-o-n-g hours of trying to ignore the extra loud baseball game on a TV with spotty sound (don't even know who was playing), tweeting, facebooking, reading saved articles on Instapaper (see, I knew that would come in handy), checking email, and completely depleting my already half-dead iPhone battery, they had patched the tire and put it back on.

My kids were gems, by the way.

The biggest surprise was that the screw was blunt. It's a mystery to me how something like that can get embedded in a tire, but I must have hit it just right. As we left, the guy behind the counter added the screw to a jug of items they've pulled out of tires. A motley collection of beat up metal of all kinds. Nails, screws, a flat wrench, wire, and so on.

I wish I'd taken a picture. It's fascinating to me that each piece of metal represented someone else's flat (or not) tire story.

Most likely much more interesting than this one.
[tweetmeme source=”Gwen_Hernandez” only_single=false]