Third Times the Charm?
Back in June I posted about my all nighter that was caused by a blown tire on the highway. I said that one flat in ten years wasn't bad, and I could live with it.

Talk about tempting fate. On October 15 I was driving from Virginia to Ohio. It was a stormy night, a little windy, and the roads were slick. I thought at first that my car was getting blown around, but then there was the sudden pop, and my car went everywhere. I got it under control and drove off the highway and into a gas station. I was about twenty miles outside of Cambridge and about 180 miles from home. Once again I called AAA, and after a while the tow driver arrived and changed my tire. He advised me to wait in Cambridge until the morning, but I pushed on to home. There's a tire store on the corner of my street, and I got a replacement tire there when I got a flat after the huge windstorm when all the streets were full of fallen trees and junk. So I got home, got a little sleep, got a new tire, and did my job as if nothing had happened.

And then yesterday - just shy of three weeks after the blow out near Cambridge, I was heading back to Virginia. I'd been on the road just 30 minutes, when I felt that familiar squishiness in the steering. S**t! Then the pop, but I had already slowed down, so no control problems. I got off the road, called AAA, and amazingly the driver arrived in about five minutes. I was back home just an hour and fifteen minutes after I left. And today I got up and took my car down to the tire store and got a new tire.

So three flats in less than five months on my commute from Ohio to Virginia and back. And I drove across the entire country and back four times without a flat tire. Something is wrong here. I clearly haven't been propitiating the right gods. But I'm getting damn good at handling blow outs at high speed.