After getting settled into the campground at Rainbow Springs State Park, we took a short walk to the river. This state park was a little confusing, with separate entrances for campground, tubing and headsprings areas. Thankfully, they warned us online to make sure we entered a specific address into the GPS for the campground, instead of just mapping to the name of the state park, so we didn’t have an issue. The weather was great, with sunny mid-high 70s, so we enjoyed the little walk, then sitting outside while we roasted hotdogs and marshmallows over a fire. Unfortunately, the marshmallows had been sitting in the pantry for a month or two, and had gotten hot and stuck together and had lost their fluffiness. But we ate a few of them before throwing the rest away. Oh well.
After we had plugged our tire a week or so ago, I happened across a blog post talking about how you’re not really supposed to drive on a plugged tire. It’s meant as a temporary fix to allow you to make it to a repair shop, similar to a spare tire. I had not heard that before, so I read up on it more and learned plugs are not the best idea, but plenty of people do it without issues. We had already talked about needing new tires, since our treads were getting low, so having two patched/plugged tires motivated us to deal with it sooner rather than later. But when I entered our truck info online, the recommended tire size was different than what we had on our truck. And when I entered the tire size manually to order ones that matched, the website wouldn’t accept them for our truck. So, I called Discount Tire to order over the phone and they told me the tires we have on our truck are a half inch wider than our wheel should have on them and they aren’t rated to carry as heavy a load as our truck is rated. Whoa, that’s not good!! They recommended we bring the truck in for them to look at the wheels, to see for sure what we needed to order.
We were only at Rainbow Springs State Park for two nights and were planning to rent kayaks at the campground and paddle up to the Rainbow Springs’ headsprings, where the river starts, then back. But we decided fixing the tire issue was more important than kayaking. The headsprings area was only a few miles out of the way, so we stopped there and walked around a bit before heading to the tire shop. The park used to be a privately owned tourist attraction, and had a different feel to it, with manmade waterfalls, landscaping and paved walkways. It was neat to see the sand bubbling where the spring water was coming up. (There’s a video of that below.) The water here is naturally 72 degrees year round and there was a swimming area roped off for people to enjoy it. I’m glad we stopped to at least see the area, even though we didn’t have enough time to play there.
There was a Discount Tire in Ocala, thirty minutes away, with shopping and restaurants within walking distance. Once we got there, the guy figured out that we did indeed still have the factory wheels, so they were not permitted to put the same sized tires back on our truck. Plus, he noticed that the wider than normal tire was rubbing a spot under our truck if it was turned hard. All that to say, I feel very fortunate that we did not have a blow out in the past 6 months while towing a load heavier than the tires were meant to carry! Our guardian angels may have put in some overtime for us. 🙂
While we waited to get the new tires put on, we walked around the shopping center. We bought something in every store we went in (Dollar Tree, Five Below, Bed Bath & Beyond and Best Buy), but it all fit in one plastic grocery bag! I do not typically like to shop, but it ended up being a fun evening — just wandering around without looking for anything in particular, then happening to find little things that we liked and could use in the RV. We also ate dinner at Ayuttaya Thai Cuisine while we waited. It was excellent! I had Pineapple Fried Rice w/ Veggies and Randy got the Bang Bang Chicken. I had never heard of Earth Fare before, so we popped in there to see what brands they carried. They had a lot of the same grocery brands that we were used to buying in CO, so we decided to go back once we picked up the truck. A VERY productive evening!
Oh, and I asked the Discount Tire guy his opinion on using the plugs in tires and he said he doesn’t recommend it at all for steel belted tires. Plugs could be dangerous and once you use one, it cannot be removed and patched by a professional later. He recommend Fix-a-Flat to used for emergencies instead. This article makes the same arguments that he did concerning plug vs patch, in case you’re interested. So, lesson learned, don’t plug a nail hole in our tire with one of the rubber plug things!
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