Getting My Money's Worth

The Giants put on a good show last night in their final night game of the season. My co-worker who got the seats found some good ones on StubHub: Section 125, behind third base and in the next-to-last row. That did mean that while I saw the splash hit (I think the second one I've witnessed in person), I only saw the ball heading over the arcade and had to look at the monitors to see it actually hit the water. But I had a great seat for Conor Gillaspie's inside-the-park home run, which also was the first homer of his major league career. I saw him trip over third base and go sprawling, and I was astounded when he got up, kept running, and made it safely to home. Now the officially scorer might have been slightly generous in not scoring that as a triple-plus-error, for if the ball had been cleanly fielded at home they would have had a shot, and frankly, the reason Gillaspie was able to even try for four was because the Rockies were falling apart on the field and missed the relay throw, but it was still exciting, and the crowd roared its approval.

The Giants are of course out of it, but I still had a good time. I hope I get a chance to attend at least one game next year, too.

Kudos to America's Tire

Late this afternoon, I took my van to America's Tire to have the tires rotated. What with all of this running back and forth to Fernley, I'm apt to be having to have that done more often, and to have to have oil changes more often, too. I also had an RV travel trailer tire in the back of the van. Lisa and I had five new travel trailer tires installed (including the spare, of course) on the trailer in May as part of the run-up to moving to Fernley. A few days ago, Lisa got up one morning and found that one of those tires had gone flat with the trailer just sitting there at the RV park. She swapped in the spare and gave the flat to me to see what I could have done.

I called Camping World's main number and they transferred me to Wilsonville, where I was routed to voice mail and never got an answer. I can't find the paperwork on the tires, but it seems to me that they could find the transaction as I'm a member of their frequent-buyer program. Of course, I'm not going to take that tire back up to Oregon just to have it fixed. There's no CW in Reno-Sparks, but there are CW stores in Vacaville and Rocklin, and I could have gone to either of them on Friday if necessary. I called Vacaville directly, and was told, "We only have a 90 day warranty on parts."

"Even tires?" I said. "We only went 600 miles on them." Nope, nothing they could do.

So when I went to America's Tire for the rotation (which is included with my tires from them), I asked them to fix the flat. I also approved buying a new tire if it happened that they couldn't fix it. I then went off to Starbucks for a while to wait for them to do the work.

When I came back, they had my van ready, and told me that they'd been able to fix the flat. "How much?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it," they told me. No charge, even though I hadn't bought the tire from them.

I'm impressed. And as I'd explained about the move to Fernley, they did point out that there is an America's Tire in the Reno-Sparks area. That's a whole lot better than the place out in Wells that turned a single flat repair into $1800 in front-and-rear-end repairs.