RV FEATURE
That ’ s all that ’ s left of the brand new tyre
While travelling this track on a recent trip , we came across a traveller who had gotten himself into a sticky situation . He ’ d had some tyre problems and attempted to fix the issue , but recognised he wasn ’ t able to . He then attempted to leave his vehicle and walk 52km to get help , taking off during the heat of the day with just one bottle of water .
Now , that ’ s not a good situation any way you look at it , and the alarm bells screamed disaster . Naturally , we stopped to help when coming across this scenario . Here ’ s what happened …
DISASTER STRIKES
The vehicle ’ s driver ( let ’ s call him Nick ) explained he ’ d been travelling along the track about 100km from Marree when he experienced severe pulling on the vehicle ’ s steering wheel . Glancing in the side mirror , he noticed his right-hand rear tyre was flat and being torn apart .
After pulling his vehicle over to jack it up and swap out the damaged wheel and tyre , Nick found his spare wheel wasn ’ t going to get him out of trouble – it had a completely different bolt pattern to his car .
Without a spare and no mobile phone reception to call for help , Nick decided to leave his jackedup vehicle and walk . His intentions were to walk around 50km further up the track to reach the facilities at the Mungerannie Hotel .
Upon hearing Nick ’ s story , we reflected on how we ’ ve come across our share of stranded vehicles during our travels . Even finding a stranded vehicle in the middle of nowhere can be unnerving . It is something we treat with a level of caution .
As a rule of thumb , the first thing we do is to always slow down when approaching a stationary vehicle . We ’ ll also jump on the UHF to see if we get a response before slowing down any further . In this case we didn ’ t get an answer , so we slowed right down while driving past the vehicle so we could at least see if anyone was inside . It was empty .
Glancing up the road , we saw a person walking ahead of us in the distance wearing a baseball cap and backpack . We pulled up alongside the walker and learnt he was the vehicle ’ s owner .
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