This past Saturday (4/2) was one of the longest, most frustrating, and enjoyable days of my life. I’m going to cheat a little bit by including the First Friday event in the longest day equation because to me it was all one in the same. This will have been our 6th First Friday event and we have come a long way since the first event. All in all it was uneventful and not as busy for us as past First Friday’s, but fun just the same. So once First Friday wrapped up it was time to get back to base to clean the Command Unit and prep for the Costco Food Truck Fest the next day. The clean up and prep took a few hours of complete before finally being able to get some shuteye. It may seem that because I had trouble sleeping that night, I had some knowledge of the events that would transpire the next day, although its more likely that I was to wound up to sleep.
The plan was to leave base at 9 AM, arrive nice and early at Costco and be setup with plenty of time to visit and chat with the other food trucks. That meant I’m up at 6 AM to make sure everything is clean and working and to buy any last minute supplies we need. This worked out so well that we left base 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Before leaving we decide to use some of the “good luck oil” that Brother JJ’s Mom made for him last year. Its just a green oily substance that I rub on the inside of my wrists and hope that good luck will be had this day and depending on how you look at things, you can say we did get very lucky.
Traffic was light on the freeway as we pulled on to US 95 heading North. We almost made this same exact trip no more then 12 hours prior driving to First Friday, however about a little over a mile before the Las Vegas Blvd exit one of the tires on the trailer blew. I quickly pulled over to the side of the road to asses the damage. It wasn’t good. The whole side wall of the front passenger trailer tire seemed to have just given way and was just a empty husk of rubber around the rim. Not happy about this turn of events as we knew we didn’t have a spare trailer tire and that we were now going to be seriously pressed for time to make it Costco before the start of the event. After a quick conversation with Brother JJ we decided that our best course of action was to try to make to bottom of the Las Vegas Blvd exit and then decide our next step.
So going very slowly we finally made it off of the freeway and as luck would have it there was a Llantera (Mexican Tire Shop) right on the corner of Las Vegas Blvd and Bonanza Road. Not believing I could get this lucky I pull in not expecting them to have a tire that would fit and quickly start thinking about doing a search for other tire shops in the area. But it must have been the good luck oil because they did have tire that would fit and could change it quickly. Not so lucky though was that when the tire blew it also damaged the metal panelling behind the tire to where it was bent up and would damage the new tire unless we fixed it somehow.
When they pulled off the blown tire, JJ and I went to work on fixing the damage panel as they put the new tire on the rim. After a few minutes of trying to bend it back flat we decided that the only thing we could do was to use duct tape to try to hold it down and away from the tire as we drove the few miles to Costco. Again the good luck oil seemed to work for us as we made it with no further damage and 30 minutes to spare before the start of the event.
However that is not the end of the story which will be continued in Part II.
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