Well the trend continued with truck fun on the road. I'm a firm believer in anyone doing fieldwork should be able to fix basic car issues, for examle changing tires. This car maintnace will usually occur at the least oppertune times, for example in a lightning storm, on a muddy wet road, and best of all in the dark. Yeah that was the story of my yesterday. After a leisuerly day in van horn (highlight was ms. tonys with lauren) we headed back out to the site. It must have rained in the mountians west of the site cause water was pouring onto the road. It didnt get as high as a couple days ago but it was enough to make things intersting. We made it to the site and watched birds as usual. All our birds left around 2030 so i pulled food while katie packed up our gear. Getting back on the road I went over this huge rock I look at every feeding time and think I should move and never get around to doing it. I also totally forgot that my cell phone was still in the blind and we took off for the otel. About 2 miles from pavement I remembered my phone so we turned around and headed back to the site. Katie stayed at the gate and I ran to the blind, grabbed my phone and jumpped into the truck since it was starting to rain again and I wanted to make it back to pavement before dark so if we got stuck again it was at least a little light. I collected Katie and we started back down the road. After a few miles and some major lake crossings i noticed the truck was pulling pretty bad and the noises were sounding a bit wierd. Great. So I stopped the truck and hopped out. Sure enough my front driver tire was looking pretty bad. No problem, ive lost count of the number of tires ive changed over the years in wtx. Those ranch roads (and air machines at a certian gas station in kent) are hard on tires. After the 2 of us won the struggle to bring the spare down we finally got things rolling. Within a 5 minutes we had the truck jacked up and the lug nuts off. Something about not parking on the only rock and with the jack point over the spot farthest from the ground probabily had something to do with it. We swapped out the tire and were back on the road within 30 min. Not too bad. Wes had gotten into town while we were gone and picked up a pizza for the 3 of us. Pizza is always good.