Then there was the time I got stranded in Canada. I had “all season” tires on my car, and the road and weather services in Canada said the roads were clear, but their definition of “clear” was not really clear.
So I got stranded in Dease Lake, a town of 303 people, unable to drive farther north or backtrack to the south. Fortunately a man who would die in a few months from lung cancer had just gotten back into town after his latest round of chemo treatment, and had the little garage shown in this photo. After a five day wait to get the tires delivered, he put them on the car on Day 6. He had no way to balance them, so I had a shaky drive to Whitehorse (in the Yukon Territory), and a tire shop there was able to balance them.
The tires cost $1,200, the motel stay cost $600, and I ate gas station food for five days, so that was an expensive learning experience.
