Blown Tire

One of the many times we have had trailer problems, this one sticks out the best in my mind. A couple years ago, we had our state show up in Pembroke, and if you don’t know where that is, well it’s far far away. In all reality, it is one town away from Canada.

So, we loaded our trailer the night before, like we always do, we got up early the next morning because we had a ways to travel.We wnet to dunking donuts before we got on the highway, then once we were on the road, and all fueled up, we put on soem music. Traveling with my mom is always loud and fun, we play loud music and just have bunch of fun jamming out. Everything was fine, until we blew a tire. We were on Route 9, and we didn’t know where we were exactly. There are a lot of townships when you are up that way, so we had no idea where we were. At the time I didn’t know what a township was, but now I know they are basically towns that aren’t fuly established. In a township, there is no town office, and some would say its land with a name.It was pretty scary because we had lost a tire on the trailer, there was no place to pull off the road, and people passing us were not going slow at all. Every time a big rig would go flying by,the horses would move around. Route 9 is kind of like the high way, so people are going between to 50 mph and 60 mph, in places it’s four lanes, and Route 9 can be very windy in places.

Another problem was the heat, it was very, very hot, and the way our trailer was built, we couldn’t easily water the horses. With our old trailer, we didn’t have windows, so in order to water the horses, we had to open the back trailer door (where the horses get loaded). So, if we wanted to water the horses, we’d have to take all of the horses off the trailer.

My mom called AAA, but they wouldn’t help us because we had a horse trailer, so basically we were on our own, with stressed horses, and crappy cell service. None of these things make for a great situation. My older sister also realizes she has to go to the bathroom very badly, but we had no bathroom. So she whined, about it a little, until she ended up deciding climbing up the small hill on the side of the road because she thought she could go in the bushes. Once she got on top of the hill she realized it wasn’t the greatest idea, so she opted to hold it.

So, we all loaded back up in out truck, and creeped along the side of the road, in hopes of finding somewhere we could turn off. We had to go slow because the trailer only had three tires, making the trailer very unbalanced, even when we were only going 5 mph. We pulled over again to try and call someone, when we had better cell service, no one would answer their phones. While we were pulled over, this older man pulled over and talked to my mom, he lived not too far up the road and knew of a place we could pull over and take the horses out. Taking the horses out was really important because we didn’t want to change a tire with the horses still in the trailer. [why?] While mom was talking, a horse trailer comes down over the hill, and it was Nick and Sylvia! Nick and Sylvia are long time family friends, that barrel raced with us, so it was a relief to see them.

We explained to them what the older man said, so they followed us to the area the man told us about. After we’d been at the turn off for a few minutes, the older guy returned with his wife, they’d brought water for us to give our horses. We unloaded all of the horses, offered them water, and walked them around a bit. The horses we very excited to be able to stretch their legs and eat some grass. While we did stuff with the horses, Nick changed our tire, and it didn’t take long.

Once we got our tire fixed, we thanked the older man and his wife, Nick and Sylvia got in the truck, we got in ours, and we followed Nick and Sylvia the rest of the way to our state show. We had a good weekend at the horse show, even though it rained. We didn’t have anymore tire trouble for the rest of the trip, and that was a relief. So, in the end everything worked out, and we got the help we needed.