Driving to Sanford

(Previous: Driving Around Orlando)

In the morning, the gathered multitude assembled for photos with the Austin:

I inspected the suspect tire, and noticed that it was indeed bulging, and that some of the fabric was showing. The rubber was rotted -- I suspect that these were the original tires -- and just coming apart.

After determining that there were no tire sales establishments in the immediate vicinity (some day there will be, when someone figures out a way to build a combination tire store and theme park: Tire World!), I aired up the spare and put it on. I suspect that the spare was also original, and unused.

The plan was to get to Sanford and the Auto Train, and then back to Virginia. There are plenty of tire places here.

We set off up I-4 toward Sanford, driving at about 45 mph in the right lane. After about 10 miles:

BAM! Flumpflumpflumpflumpflumpflumpflump!

The virgin spare tire, also dry-rotted, had failed. I managed to get the car onto the side of the road, and we faced the surprisingly difficult task of getting a tow truck to come pick up the car. Our AAA membership had expired -- which is insane, since we've got six cars -- but in the end, they did agree to dispatch a tow truck for a $25 service fee. How exactly they intend to collect that fee is a mystery, since they never took any credit card information from us. Oh, and the tow truck company does not take credit cards on weekends, the towing guy informed us. Yes, that makes sense. Instead, they'll take a personal check from you. (We paid cash.)

When the tow truck arrived, we then faced the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out where to get tires. You'd figure that a tow truck driver would be in the subtle employ of at least one purveyor of tires, but no. The AAA-dispatched guy had no idea at all where the car should be taken. We opted in the end to go to a place called Tire Kingdom. It was open on Sunday, and it was in Sanford, which meant less driving for us to get to the train. The tow was 17 miles, and when the tow truck unloaded the car at Tire Kingdom, I had owned the car for almost exactly 24 hours.

Tire Kingdom was pretty busy. Most tire places in Orlando are closed on Sunday (because, of course, most people have lots of time during the week to get new tires -- they can just take a vacation day for the purpose); since Tire Emporium was not, they were deluged with customers. You'd think that the pretenders to the Tire Throne would see that there was opportunity for them on Sunday, but there you are.

It took them a while to get to our car, and we missed the Auto Train. In the end, though, we did get four new "SONAR" brand tires for about $30 each. These SONAR tires -- obviously the finest product of the tire-wright's art -- were the only tires they had that fit the car, and they only had four of them. The least dry-rotted old tire became the spare.

While we were waiting for the Tire Kings to do their thing, we wandered around the immediate area.

Being without a vehicle in Florida is very difficult. It's easier to function on foot in southern California than it is in Florida. The only people you see walking along the road in Florida are very poor black people. Not scullery maids and shoeshine guys and the like -- they all have cars. And I've never seen a white person or a Latino walking in Florida. Possibly the Florida White Persons' Benevolent Association and the National Council of La Raza operate shuttle buses for their poor.

Anyway, the only people I've ever seen walking around in Florida are very desperately poor black people. People who are one step away from wearing a barrel with straps over their shoulders rather than clothes, they're so poor. Everyone else manages, somehow, to buy a car. And why is this? Because the Florida pedestrian is constantly faced with things like this:

That's right, that's a crosswalk. There's a short sidewalk on the near side of the road (leading from the parking lot of a Cadillac dealer); I was standing on it as I took this photo. Notice that not only does the crosswalk not lead to another sidewalk or even a path, it leads into a bunch of nasty Floridian plants (they nearly all have thorns or stickers or are otherwise painful and aggressive), and to a spot where they couldn't even build a sidewalk without first relocating the telephone lines. This is how the pedestrian is treated in Florida.

All of this made us all the more anxious to once again become motorists, and thus (in Florida) human. We cooled our heels in the Tire Kingdom some more, using their phone to book a hotel room for the night -- there is only one Auto Train a day. We chose the Best Western Marina Inn in Sanford, because American Express said that it was a three-star resort (more on this later).

When the Tire King (actually, I suppose it was the Tire Crown Prince or the Tire Duke of Seminole County or something, on a Sunday; the King would be out on a tire hunt) finished with the car, we loaded it back up and zoomed off toward the Marina.

Next: Sanford, FL 32771