Tyre trouble

Dropped HH off at the club this morning and was tootling home when a rear tyre burst.  I’ve never had that happen before and was worried that I might have bought dud tyres, till I remembered how we were forced over the edge of our narrow, cobbled road yesterday, which must have caused the damage. The road’s in terrible shape, two different utilities having torn up first one side, then the other, and while one replaced the cobbles, but badly, the other simply didn’t replace them. Anyway, we just have to be thankful that it happened at low speed on a country road, and not when we were driving down at night, at 110 kph.
 
Brazilian men are generally wonderful when they see a woman with car trouble – as long as she looks helpless or asks for help (a Scottish friend of ours once had a puncture right outside a bar, in the pouring rain, and immediately started changing the tyre herself, while all the men in the bar looked on in amusement. Eventually she had to ask for help and made some sarcastic comment, to which they replied “well, we’d have been happy to help, but you didn’t seem to want it”). Today I was lucky enough to break down right outside a small condominium and didn’t even pretend to know what to do. I asked the gateman for help and he changed the tyre for me, for which I was more than happy to give him enough to buy a few beers with – or maybe a soft drink, I suspect his church frowns on alcohol.
 

This put paid to my plans for the morning, but at least I found a repair shop open and solved the problem with a tyre from our old car, which is in pretty good shape. Lunch at the club, then dog walking, mending and washing and I’m feeling quite virtuous – and we’ve put the journey down to Rio off till tomorrow morning.