[MudDog]

From what I have read, trailer tires typically do not last as long as you would expect with a car tire because they are not used nearly as often. When the tire sits, the rubber starts to rot. When it's used, the heat, flexing, etc activate the compounds in the rubber that keep the tire 'young'. If we only drove our cars a couple of times a month, we'd likely be reading a lot more about car tire failures.

I still have the original 14" Marathons on our TM and have put over 20,000 miles on them in all sorts of conditons and just returned from a 4,000 mile trip to the NorthWest, Glacier NP, Yellowstone, Salt Lake and Las Vegas and went from near freezing temps to days over 105...and knock on wood had no problems. From my experience, I think properly inflated and loaded tires can handle the mileage and heat....the age is the key factor.

I did replace the original rubber stems with metal stems and believe many of the early failures of Marathons could have been stem failure related and I also have a tire pressure monitoring system to monitor the temp and tire pressure of all 3 tires, so I'm never running under-inflated.

I don't want to be spending money on new tires all time, but don't want to push my luck to far either. I will likely replace my tires in the next 12 months or so.

If it were me, I would continue on the vacation and try to put the stress behind me and salvage what you can. You should have 3 new tires now, so chances of another failure should be greatly reduced.

As Dave mentioned, feel the hubs and tires from time to time when you stop. They should be warm too mildly hot but not burining hot.

--jim