A couple of weeks ago disaster struck…
Dave and I were in the middle of Spain….
We were doing a road trip from northern France to Gibraltar…
We were about 700 miles in….
On the motorway/highway and I suddenly got a warning…
One of my tires was deflating….
The worst part is Tesla’s don’t carry a spare tire…
Luckily there was a turning, so I turned off…
We ended up in a very small town in rural Spain…
When the tire had completely deflated we found ourselves outside a local mechanics.
Neither of us speak any Spanish…..
And no one in this town seem to speak any English….
With a lot of sign language and a bit of help from Google translate…
I was informed that there was a tire place just down the road…
We drove on the flat tire and eventually found the tire shop…
The guy in the tire shop took the wheel off….
The tire was completely ripped…
The inside edge of the tire was completely worn off!!!
He then informed us that it might take two or three days to get a new tire…
Apparently Tesla’s use unusual tires…
Not the sort of tire a local tire shop keep in stock, unless you happen to live in a big city…
We were doing our best to communicate with the guy in the tire shop using Google translate.
However this didn’t seem to be very accurate…
From what we could make out the guy was telling us that there was a tire shop across town which had a tire in stock..
But we weren’t even sure how to get there….
So the guy in the tire shop fitted an old second-hand tire to our car.
This was completely the wrong size for the car however it would get us to the other tire shop…
About an hour later we ended up in tire shop number 2
This was a much bigger tire fitting centre…
They informed us that they didn’t have the correct tire, in fact it might take to 3 days to get one!!!
I phoned up Tesla…
Tesla were very generous and offered to bring me a spare wheel within an hour or 2…
This was a wheel which I would be boring until I could make my way to a Tesla service centre…
About an hour 45 minutes later a truck turned up with the spare wheel on the back…
This was not a Tesla service engineer, it seemed to be a local recovery guy…
I guess he had just collected the wheel from a Tesla service centre somewhere…
He then attempted to take the wheel off the car…
However he had the wrong type of spanner!!!
The socket on his wheel wrench was not deep enough!!!
I looked at my watch…
I realised that the tire fitting shop, which was about a hundred meters away, was going to close in about five minutes!!!
Dave and I looked at each other!!!
We both sprinted over to the tire fitting shop to stop them closing….
Luckily we caught them just in time…
They knew who we were because we been hanging around all day outside the shop!!
They then fitted the spare wheel to the car for free!
By now it was about 10 PM and we had wasted an entire day …
So we decided to change our schedule, and visit Gibraltar next summer…
Instead we decided to drive to Madrid, as there’s a Tesla service centre there.
We set off thinking this would be a simple two hour drive…
How wrong we were!!
We got about 30 miles down the motorway/highway and suddenly we heard a flapping noise!!
I pulled over…
It was dark, and a very dangerous place to stop…
The hard shoulder/breakdown lanes in Spain are only half width!!
I got my phone out and use the flashlight to have a look at the tires…
The second back tire had started to disintegrate!!
There was a big piece of rubber hanging off it!!
Luckily I had a pair of wire cutters in the car so I cut this piece of rubber off the tire…
I felt round the back of the tire and I could feel some of the metal webbing coming through.
However it was still inflated…
We still had about 160 miles to go!
So we ended up having to drive at 50 miles an hour with the emergency blinkers flashing…
About 30 miles outside Madrid another piece of rubber came off the tire…
However we finally made it to our hotel at about three in the morning!
The next day we drove to the Tesla service centre…
They informed us that they didn’t carry the spare tires!!
All spare tires were held by the local tire place down the road, about 20 miles away!!
So we ended up having to drive another 20 miles….
We finally got to the tire shop in Madrid..
However it took them over an hour to find out how much these tires were going to cost!!
I don’t think they had ever sold one before…
It turned out that the front tires were also dangerously damaged…
Why?…
The tracking on the car had been knocked out..
I guess the last 2000 – 3000 miles of driving had had completely ruined the tires …
We finally got all four tires replaced….
This cost us €1200..
We are at the tire shop so long that by this time I got my laptop out…
After checking my emails and realised that I had made $1,498 that day just from affiliate marketing!!
Why is that?
That’s because I have loads of
out there on the Internet that generate the income on a daily basis…
Would you like to learn how I do this?
Dave and I spent a couple of days in Madrid…
And then drove home….
There are two things I’m going to do from now on…
Dave and I still had a great time..
We read a fascinating book called Life 3.0 all about artificial intelligence, highly recommended…
I also discovered that vegan food is plentiful in Spain..
Everywhere we stopped even the smallest of town seem to have a vegan restaurant!!
Dave and I are back home now…
I’m super excited because I am about to launch a new YouTube channel…
I will keep you updated on that…
Talk soon,
Sarah