Tires that Bite

One of the many bells and whistles on my gorgeous Cypress Green Toyota Highlander is a low tire pressure sensor, which lit up a couple of weeks ago. I checked pressures and everything seemed okay, so I added a couple of pounds of air all around and the light went off.

Only to return a few days later.

I suspected the right rear tire, and sure enough, my adopted Toyota dealer in Atlanta found a nail through the sidewall.

For those of you who haven't experienced the joys of nails through the sidewall of a tire in recent years, here's the news: No one will repair this kind of hole anymore. Unless you are one of the lucky few to get a nail in the bottom of your tire, you are SOL. You'll have to buy a new tire.

Here's a bit more news: It doesn't make much sense to buy a single new tire when your others are about 5,000 miles away from replacement.

And the topper to the news: Toyota put one of the rarest sizes of tires on my Highlander Sport. It's a 19" wheel - very sharp looking on the SUV, but extremely rare. Most trucks and SUVs of this size use an 18" wheel.

So for me, there are exactly three tires available to use. One is the Toyo that came with the car, and given their relatively short life - 35,000 miles - I wasn't keen on a direct replacement, even though I could have bought 2 of 'em and run them on the back for a while before replacing the fronts a few months later. Ah well.

The second option is a Bridgestone that has horrible reviews all over the interweb.

And the third option: Another Toyo, made in China (of course!), but this one has a deep all-weather tread with nice rain channels that could come in handy in Wetlanta. Given my extremely wide selection, I decided to go with those.

Total bill for four new tires: $920. Oh. My. God.

At least these are rated for 60,000 miles, and I did add the "road hazard" insurance, so I'm completely protected against any further nail-in-the-sidewall incidents. I'm thinking that long before another 60K rolls off the odometer, I'll fall in love with another Toyota vehicle and will bid farewell to the Highlander.

And I sure hope I feed a few Chinese for $920.

Man on the Moon!

Oh, boy!

That was Walter Cronkite's reaction to the landing 40 years ago July 20. No doubt it was the reaction of all of us who were lucky enough to live through and experience the apex of mankind's achievements to date.

I'm sure it was my Dad's reaction as well. On that Sunday evening, sometime after the actual landing and before Neil Armstrong's journey down the ladder to the surface, Dad came in from the farm early.

Dad never came in from the farm early. If us kids didn't know it already from Walter Cronkite and CBS News, we knew it was a momentous occasion just from Dad's behavior.

I don't recall a lot of our family's banter or interactions on that evening, probably because I was the "space nut" of the family and so totally engrossed in what was happening that I simply tuned out everything except the foggy black and white images coming from a quarter million miles away. (With respect, Tom was a space fan as well.)

What I do remember is my favorite newscaster's complete loss for words that afternoon when the lunar module settled down on the surface of another planet. I am deeply saddened that Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary; I would have loved to hear his reminisces about this golden age of spaceflight, which coincidentally was also the pinnacle of his own career.

Then, in the evening, Armstrong made his famous "giant leap for mankind" speech and we kids were enraptured by the pictures, by the commentary, by the concept: Man on the moon!

As the decades have rolled on (the years keep comin' and they don't stop comin', to borrow from Smash Mouth), I have come to see man on the moon not only as the greatest achievement of mankind to date, but also as a kind of benchmark of the "American Way" that, sadly, we seem to have strayed from. What I mean is: Kennedy gave us a vision to do the unthinkable in a very short period of time, and guess what? We did it. We did what we said we would do.

I hope that we re-learn this fundamental aspect of the American Way, and well before another 40 years passes.