explore no more

This picture should not look normal to you. If it does, you might need to drink your V8 or simply sit up straight.

Yesterday our beloved white '90-something Ford Explorer bit the dust...literally.

I got a phone call from Ben after school yesterday saying that I would have to come pick up him to go to the doctors appointment instead of meeting him there. I asked why and he explained that the Explorer broke but added that it was kind of funny how it ended up dying.

Turns out, as he was driving near our home, the tire literally broke off. All the fancy car parts, lug nuts, calipers (or whatever they are called) finally busted under the pressure caused by an accident that occurred last year.

As B was driving around yesterday, he noticed a wierd noise along with a strange vibration on his left front tire. He was prompted not to drive on the freeway to get home from SLC and instead, took the longer route on side streets. Not even a mile from home, the sound got worse, he pulled into the emergency lane, and drove slowly to try to make it home. Before he got home, though, the tire snapped with enough force to bump into a passing car, and rolled into the middle of traffic.
This is where a tire should be but is not. Ben seems to think that it wouldn't be worth it to actually take time and money to fix the car, which we've known was on it's last leg for a while. Luckily, Ben's grandpa was available to come down to help him get a AAA tow-truck for free to get the Explorer back to our house, where it will probably sit for a while longer.

I'm just glad that he wasn't on the freeway when the tire broke; we are both almost certain that the Explorer would have flipped and the outcome would have been much worse.