Innovation

I thought I would type something up about flat tires and my partner.

In Moldova there are many roads that are in real need of a repair, especially the back roads of most villages or cities.

Well my partner has the roughest of times navigating these roads without getting a flat tire. It could be the 20km drive to work on dirt roads with 3ft deep ruts everyday or it could just be that he has bad luck. In my 2 1/2 weeks in site he has gotten 2 flat tires with me in the car. This only makes me wonder how many he gets daily/weekly/monthly.

Any way my partner has quite the strategy for getting out of these predicaments. He always keeps a bicycle pump in his passenger seat. When we get a flat tire I jump out and pump it up as much as possible, hopefully enough to drive on. Then I jump in the car as fast as I possibly can with pump in hand and he drives as fast as he can to the next repair station before enough of the air leaks out to make the car un-drivable. We stop at no intersections (what Moldovans do?), stop for no pedestrians, stop for no speed bumps (better known as ruts), we stop for nothing. At that moment the only worry we have is not having to get back out of the car to pump the tire up again.

Both times we have successfully completed this task and have driven into the repair shop at least an inch off the rim. Success!