September 16 - Drive to Renfrew, Ontario

Trying to avoid more unpleasantness with the trailer tires, I checked the inflation pressures and tightened up all the lug nuts before we set off for the day. Although I was very tempted to stay and explore the air force museum out near the North Bay airport, it was raining and we decided to use the day to drive over toward Ottawa. The next Volksmarch we could find on our route was in Renfrew, Ontario, so we set that as our goal for the day. Monika found a private campground just outside of Renfrew that sounded quite nice, so we headed for that.

The drive went well until we were coming up on our turnoff for the campground at Renfrew. The slopes were gentle, the rain was only light to moderate, and there was no fog so we could easily hold a 55-60 mile per hour rate for most of the day. But at Renfrew a Caravan passed me with the people yelling that something was wrong with the trailer, so we pulled over and found that a tire on the left side had blown apart. Nuts! That made it the third tire of the original four trailer tires that had now failed, and the fourth one had signs of uneven tire wear that I had previously found on two of the others. So I changed yet another tire and had forebodings that the fourth one would soon follow its ill-fated comrades.

We made it to the campsite without further incident, set up the trailer, had lunch, and then I lay down to meditate about tires. (That's how I usually mediate; it is a lot easier than holding a Yoga position, but the danger is that meditation tends to lead to napping!) I was now at a loss as to what exactly had gone wrong with all these tires. The tread on that tire had looked fine when I checked it and re-torqued the lug nuts that morning, and I had found no signs of being loose when I removed the tire. So the "loose lug nuts cause tire wobble cause tread failure" hypothesis seemed to be dead in the water. But what else? I wish I had the tree that Buddha had sat underneath to become enlightened, because I certainly could have used some enlightenment. I rounded up the usual suspects of over-inflation, under-inflation, overheating, overloading, misalignment, over-speeding, bad batch of tires (I was stretching there, but at least it wouldn't be my fault!) and heaven only knew what else. One central problem was whether I was seeing the results of a single cause or whether the different failures had possibly had different causes. Occam's Razor suggested I pursue a single cause scenario, but sometimes the world is messier than that and I could not really rule out the multi-cause scenario.

Having mulled that over rather fruitlessly, I headed off to Canadian Tire in Renfrew to see if they had a replacement. Unfortunately this store didn't stock trailer tires, but the guy at the counter was nice enough to call another tire place in town to see if they had one. That place not only did, but they were willing to stay open after normal closing hours to mount the tire on the rim for us, which we thought was very nice. It set us back $122 Canadian, which was a lot more than we had paid in Montana, but at least we once again had a spare. Now if I could just figure out why they were failing!

As we drove back from the tire shop we saw the starting point for the Renfrew Volksmarch and decided to stop in to sign up for the walk. It was time for dinner and anyway it looked like we'd get some more rain pretty soon, so we just took the map and stuff with us and drove back to the trailer. After our normal light supper I worked on the journal while Monika transcribed the German lyrics for "Ein Kleines Lied" from one of our German CDs. The song was put to the melody for "Amazing Grace" and done, I thought, very well indeed. Since I had been looking for secular lyrics for that wonderful melody, I was really happy to have Monika jot them down for me. Of course, they were in German, but that was better than nothing! Monika also had written down the dulcimer notes for the tune, so a half-Canadian ended up singing an English tune with German lyrics in an American accent on an Appalachian dulcimer based on Scottish bagpipes, truly something that would only happen in America!

We ended the evening reading Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons", which had the same protagonist as "The DaVinci Code". We felt it also had a very similar story structure (academic hero, attractive heroine, gruesome murder, secret society, and a lot of chasing around), at least for the chapters we read up to about 10 p.m. when we turned off the light for the night. Seeing the similarities made it somewhat easier to put down, which would otherwise have been quite difficult because the story was written in the same extremely fast paced, page turning fashion as "The DaVinci Code".