Trip two started similar to trip one, sitting at home contemplating what to do. “Hey wanna go to Kenting Beach? I’ll be by Tucheng in about 30 mins.”
I look at my watch, look at my phone, look at my watch again for no reason, and start packing.
He picked us up, right on time. 30 minutes later we were piled into the van headed south was all I knew.
About an hour into the trip we hear.. flump, flump, flump, flump… The dreaded symptoms of either a flat tire or a troll beating the underbelly of the carriage. We pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. Cars were zooming past at approximately the speed of sound. I looked at the driver’s side tire, “yep, no fairy tale here. We got a flat.”
To our surprise, road side assistance was on it stat, before we had time to arrange pickup, a tow truck was already backing up to assist. FYI you can’t change a flat on the highway, well I mean you probably can, but the accepted procedure is to be towed to a tire shop. After some slick bargaining, the tow bill went from $3,000NT to $1,500. I take zero credit for the bargaining as I was still holding the car jack questioning why the damn thing insisted on being stubborn…
Towed to the tire shop.
I will spare the details on this as it was mostly waiting around, but he negotiated a sweet deal on four new tires and we now had the confidence to continue on the journey. I will add that this is the first tire shop that doubled as a zoo.
Approximately 8 hours into the trip, we were arriving at our destination – leaving us the night to enjoy out and a full day to enjoy the beach. All in all, VanLife is great and I look forward to our next adventure. I will save the words from here and allow the video below to speak for itself.
