Blown Tire

We got about 15 miles South of El Paso and Becky called me on the walkie talkie to say that she thought that one of my tires looked like it was going flat. I turned off the cruise control and then felt a slight jerk. I heard a bunch of rattling and hit the nearest off ramp. I could see in the rear view mirror that a section of the RV wheel well was sticking out. I pulled into a big lot (abandoned gas station) to check out the damage.

One of our left trailer tires disintegrated almost entirely and did some pretty major damage to the side of the RV and wheel well. Luckily the grey water valve and connector were not damaged, only the grey water pull vlave was torn off along with the housing and some of the side of the RV. The wheel well is also pretty torn up, but as far as I can tell, no damage to the interrior of the RV or electrical system. The brake on the wheel that went flat doesn't seem to be working either, so it could have done some damage to the electrical on the rear axle... I'll have to do some checking with my test light to find out where the electrical was damaged. It's possible that it's not been working for some time - I can't see any damage to the wires...

We're fairly lucky - we have a motel across the street and there may be a tire shop in town that can help us get back on the road. If not, we're only about 25-30 miles South of El Paso, so we will be able to get full services tomorrow and for tonight we have everything we need to spend the night if necessary...

There's a big storm brewing on the horizon and I can hear thunder in the distance, so we made sure that the trailer was parked in a place where I can work on it and be out of the sun and rain if it starts pouring on us... The bad part of being under the roof - our solar panels are blocked from the sun, so we are running entirely off battery power until we move. We'll see if my 2-3 day calculation was correct or not. We've become spoiled with abundant power the past few weeks.