Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Up on Blocks

Rockport, Texas 
Saltwater Flats RV Resort
Weather Condition; High 67 Low 59, Damp and Cloudy

We have been extremely busy getting things done around here.

We had to locate a surety bonding company so we could get the required VIP Bond for our summer gate attendant job. We didn’t know anything about surety bonds until we bid on this job.  We made a few phone calls and found an insurance agency in Rockport that had a underwriter that writes surety bonds. We stopped by the insurance office and talked with an agent.  We explained to her what we needed and she made a phone call. She said she had an underwriter that could do the surety bond. We were given an application to fill out.

We went home, filled out the application. The following morning we returned the application to the insurance office.
Next we needed to replace the tires on the trailer. We did some research and decided to get our tire at Discount Tire. We buy our truck tires from them, so why not!

Several days went by and we still hadn’t heard anything from the insurance company regarding the bond. Dawn was starting to get nervous that maybe we were not going to get bonded. I told her, there wasn’t any reason we wouldn’t. She still worried anyway.
I called the agent on Friday morning and left a message. We ran a few errands and did some housekeeping. At 4:30 the phone rang. It was the agent telling me that the bond would cost $100.00 and that we needed to pay for the bond up front.

Dawn and I jumped in the truck and ran to the agent’s office which closes at 5:00.

Now back to the tires, we got a quote for our tires at Craig’s Tires in Rockport. We then called Discount Tire and got a quote from them. Looks like Discount Tire is about $40.00 cheaper per tire.
We talked with Daryl and scheduled a day that he could take our tires off the trailer so we could go to Discount Tire in Corpus Christi. That’s the nearest store to us.

On Monday, Daryl showed up and jacked up the trailer and loaded the tires into the truck for us.
 

 You know we’re a Red Neck when your trailer is sitting on blocks!!!

 While we were gone a rumor went through the park that our tires were repoed!  Thanks Marsha.       
 We decided to go with the Yokohama Geolandar tires. 

We sat at the window and watched as they worked on replacing our tires.  It normally doesn’t take long at Discount Tire but we were lucky enough to get the new kid in the tire shop.  We watched him take our old tires on the rims and install new valve stems. He then put the new tires on and go them all aired up. He had the new tires lined up ready for the spin balance machine that was in use, when the shop foreman walked over and started removing the valve stems. Dawn and I looked at each other and said “What The Heck!”

The kid started the procedure all over again.  We watched as he redid each tire. Once he was finished, he started with the spin balance. He seemed to struggle with the spin balance machine. The shop foreman went over and helped him with a couple of the tires. We noticed that in all the confusion, one of the tires was put on the machine and then taken off without being spin balanced.
When it was time for us to load up the tires, we told the kid that one was not spin balanced. I showed him which one got skipped. He told me they were all done and I explained to him that we were watching and knew what happened. He took it back and ran it through the machine. Dawn noticed that all the tires were 2012 except for one. She told the foreman she wanted all of the tires to be 2012’s. They grabbed it up and replaced it. We had to wait a little longer but we got what we wanted.

We returned home about 2:30 and waited about 15 minutes for Daryl to return and put our new tires on the trailer.

We are so very, very glad to have new tires on our rig. We feel safer already!   


Copyright Notice All text and photos found on cruzin2some.blogspot.com is copyrighted and may not be published, rewritten, distributed or downloaded without permission of the owner of cruzin2some.blogspot.com. All Rights Reserved. ©cruzin2some 2010