[B_and_D]

I certainly feel your pain, especially with a 5 month old and no spare stuck along side the road.....and was it hot? The last time we had one was along Highway 46, it's a two-lane highway in central CA, and there was no shoulder. We had our 19-year old cat with us; had to put her in the carrier so she wouldn't run out onto the road, and I had to hold up the rear shell of the TM so that the passing semi's wouldn't blow it down. I watched some doofus try to perform an unwise pass and hoped that he wasn't going to slam into the rear of the TM (and us). It was so slanted that we had to use two jacks and multiple blocks to get our TM jacked up enough to change the tire. Blowouts are no fun.

The things that I believe caused our blowouts were age of the tires and heat. Speed seems to increase the heat in the tires.

We bought new tires (again, these are the second set of new ones) right before out trip to Sequoia Ntl Monument this summer and got heavier duty, more-ply tires, but stuck to the 14". Hopefully they'll work better than the Goodyear Marathons we had on there before. They sure weigh a lot more than the old tires, I could hardly hold them up to put them on compared to the old ones. They are higher weight rated too, but I can't recall by exactly how much.

Both of our blowouts have been on the passenger side, so, luckily we haven't sustained any damage to the plumbing.

If we've had a blowout, we always stop and try to find a replacement right away. If we have to spend the night, we'll do that rather than press on during the night or a Sunday. The last time we had our tires switched, I asked them to give us the other tires back so that we would have an "extra" spare in case we wanted to do a long trip and needed to make time. I figured that anyone could mount a tire, but finding a replacement might be tricky, depending on where you were. I'll probably find somewhere to mount one or two under the trailer (our spare is on the rear bumper).

Our tires have very few miles on them so far, but I'll keep everyone posted on their success. Other people have switched from the lighter-duty tires to the heavier ones, and so far I haven't heard any complaints.

Hopefully wmtire, our tire expert will chime in. He's very knowledgable in this area. I wish we had him here to help us with our tire decisions. He advised me via PM on what to ask for, but our local tire guy was kind of ? about what we wanted so I'm hoping what we bought will work for us.