Kaboom!

I was on the way back from climbing, pitch black in the pouring rain, doing about 50mph... and hit the world's deepest pothole. The jolt was so hard that it felt like I'd driven straight into a wall and felt so violent that at first I thought the entire front of the car had come off! Thankfully that wasn't the case, but sadly there was some damage to the car in the form of a blown tyre.


If it's daylight with good weather and my boot is empty I'm not already worn out from climbing I can change a tyre in about 5 minutes. Sadly with the rain, cold (I was only wearing shorts+t-shirt because of climbing!), dark, having to find my locking wheel nut key, having to keep getting out of the way of occcasional cars as well as having to work out where my jack-point was (first time on this car), it took me about 20-25 minutes to change the tyre and then to put everything back away again afterwards.

I went to the tyre place as planned in the morning and asked for new tyres for the front of the car (should always replace in pairs). They looked at the existing ones and it turns out (since verified) that the car actually came with some pretty nice tyres... and they wanted £175 / US $267 for 2. I've since looked online to see if they were ripping me off, but no not really - Ouch. So anyway, I agreed and didn't want cheaper tyres as it'd just change how it'd been handling last two years and they went off to start on it. 5 minutes later the man comes running in and says I've got bigger problems than the tyre and I follow him out and I see what he means:


EEK! When it comes off the car and it goes in the boot you only see the front and I guess in my tired state I hadn't thought about it :( So I went over to the next town to the Ford dealership and asked them about an alloy. They looked it up... £150 / US $229... just for the one alloy. That's without tyres as mentioned above or the tracking that I should get done (~£25 / US $38). Eeek! Sadly the alloy wasn't in stock, but they're ordered one in and I should be able to get it sorted at the weekend. So much money :(