It seems that whenever something goes wrong, it’s always while we are on the road which is exactly what happened this past February. We had just gotten back on the road from staying the night at a casino parking lot and felt a sudden jerk of the wheel. I looked in our backup camera to see that the passenger side tire on the dolly had blown.
It is in these situations that people have a tendency to panic. What are we going to do? How are we going to get to our destination? How much is this going to cost? A laundry list of other questions like that flood through our minds. This panic can be paralyzing for some. For others, it can cause anger.
I think the fight or flight response is kicking in from days of old. Instead of preparing to run from or fight a predator, you are instead stuck on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with a blown tire. There really isn’t much to fight or flee from so the cycle of panic continues.
Breaking the cycle of panic is paramount to getting ahold of the situation. I have found that two things work well for this: (1) taking a few deep breathes and actively telling myself that panicking and getting angry isn’t going to help and (2) having a partner who can verbally give me a proverbial slap in the face to bring me down to reality.
There is another pitfall one can fall into after the panic subsides, shame. It is the moment you start asking yourself darker questions. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? If I had only checked the tires more carefully? What if I had checked them when I was still in a city?
This process can lead to extra stress and lost time. I have tried to practice the following list of questions in order to methodically deal with situations that we have run into on the road.
Is everyone OK?
The answer to this question determines the next steps. If someone is hurt, getting them help either via self-care or emergency services is first priority. If everyone is OK then you no longer have a problem. You have an inconvenience. There are of course minor inconveniences and major inconveniences. In our case, we were all fine.
Are we in a safe location for the time being?
It may be necessary to limp your rig to a more secure location in order to keep everyone safe. This may not be ideal for the rig. But you are going to be able to deal with the problem easier if you are in a safe location.
What is the problem?
Put in the simplest words possible, what needs to be fixed before you can move on? In our case, our tire had blown.
What do I need?
Identify what you need to solve the problem. It may be a repair service or a tow truck. We just needed a new tire and tools to remove the blown tire.
How do I get what I need?
If you have a roadside assistance membership, it is a good idea to call them up and discuss the problem and possible solutions with them. You may not end up using them, but they will probably be calmer and collected then you at that moment.
We used our phones to find tire places and called around until we found a place that had the right size and type of tire we needed. We already had the tools to remove the tire from the dolly.
Make a plan and execute it one step at a time.
The tire place was about a 30 to 40-minute drive from our location. I used Google Maps to mark my location as a parking spot so I could find my way back. Our plan was to remove the car from the dolly and remove the tires. Natalie would wait at the RV while I drove to the tire place to get new tires mounted on the rims and then I would put the new tires on myself.
Some plans for emergencies will be a bit more complicated than that. The important thing to remember is you are only completing one step at a time. If it helps, write the steps you plan to take down and cross them off as you do them. It will help make you feel like you are making progress.
Below is the video that Natalie and I made of the actual incident. Keep in mind that I look rather collected because by the time we made the decision to film, we had already gone through the panic mode, calmed down, and made a plan.
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