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Reason 29: Good Samaritans

Friday was quite possibly the LONGEST day of my life.  Not really, but definately a long day.

The day began at 6:30 am as I prepared and left for the Internship Fair.  I was selected (with a myriad of others) to set up a display of my internship as an Athletic Training student.  Set up began at 7:30 am and I did not leave until 1:30 pm.  It was a great experience- I loved telling people about the coolest major on campus.  It was a LOT of time on my feet though.  I did get a $50 bookstore gift card for participating and some yummy food.  So it was worth it.

After the fair I went down to the track meet.  That was really fun.  We've been working with so many of the track athletes this semester, so it was fun to see them compete.  I was there for about 4 hours.  Also a lot of time standing and it got SO COLD!  But I had a blast.

Finally, me and two friends left for St. George.  All was going well until we were outside of Scipio and I felt my car vibrating an awful lot.  I turned off the music (Michael Buble, of course) and asked Sarah if she thought the car was shaking. She said maybe- but it could be the road.  I thought something under the hood was dying. The car began shaking so much that I couldn't see out of my mirror.  We were in the 80 mph zone so I was trying to slowly decelerate as to not get hit from behind.  I was down to about 45 mph and begin to pull over as I heard a loud bang and we went careening to the side of the road.  Jocelyn woke up quickly.  It was extremely scary but I was (thankfully) able to keep in control and pull over.  We were all in shock.  We pulled really far off the road and found that the back, right tire had separated THEN blown.

A kind gentleman stopped with his wife and four kids to help us.  Luckily the only damage was the tire and a pulled off side panel.  This guy was awesome and taught us how to change a tire as he fixed it.  We were so absolutely grateful.  After an hour (we had a terrible jack and had to read the owners manual to figure out how to lower my spare) we were on our way.  We drove with the music off- we were VERY paranoid.  After that the drive actually turned out to be awesome.  We stopped in Beaver to stuff our faces at Wendy's and, as Sarah predicted before the exploding tire, we were BFF by the end of the ride.  Haha!

My tire.  Or lack of.

"Now class, this is the anatomy of a tire..."

And this is our tire changing lesson on a Friday night.
On the side of the road in Scipio, Utah.
On Easter weekend.
In the cold.  

When we took my car into get the tire repaired, we were told by the mechanic that he was surprised the car did not roll.  That was scary.  Had the separating tire not grabbed the side panel and pulled it off, dragging it on the road and shaking the car, we very possibly could have been going 80 mph when the tire blew.  There could have been lots of different endings to this story, but we were extremely lucky.  And we are all very grateful.  And tonight this post is dedicated to you, our good samaritan friend and his family.  Your kind act really touched us.

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