Driving back from the 2-day Butterfly Marketing Workshop in Las Vegas, Nevada, in early June, I took the less traveled route through Bullhead City via route 68 to Kingman, Arizona. As you can readily see, the  views of the Black Mountains along route 68 are spectacular. I drove slowly and stopped often to take in the beauty. At Kingman I continued my leisurely journey on  route 66 to Seligman where I then continued on I40 to home in Albuquerque.

Sunset on route 164 before arriving at Searchlight, Nevada, for the night.

Heading into Black Mountains from Bullhead City on route 68 towards Kingman.

Late lunch here in Peach Springs, Arizona, on route 66. Good food & service.

In March I  noticed that I  had a big nail in the right rear tire on my Isuzu Trooper since that tire was slowly loosing air pressure. I drove to our local Costco dealer where I had purchased 4 new tires back in June, 2007, for $516.56 to get that tire repaired. In addition to the big nail, they also found a big screw in the inside sidewall which meant that they couldn’t repair the tire. No problem. They would replace it. But now they found that Michelin no longer made this Michelin LTX M/S (item# 846315) tire. The newer version was Michelin LTX M/S XL (item# 847226) and looked identical as far as my  eyes were concerned. But apparently Michelin & Costco had a rule that if they couldn’t replace the tire with the identical version they would have to  replace all 4 tires. Ok by me as long as I didn’t have to pay for the extra 3 tires. Even though I already had 11,262 miles on those tires, the supervisor couldn’t detect any wear! This meant that I only had to pay for the  difference in price for the one damaged tire and the new replacement tire, which came to only  $8.54. Since the Trooper already had 174,838 miles and I normally would get about 100K miles on these tires, it  looks like these tires will most likely outlast the Trooper by a long shot. These new tires are more valuable than the current resale value of this entire 1991 Isuzu Trooper!

This experience brings up several interesting observations. Over many decades I  have tried different tire brands and have always come back to Michelin. Even though Michelin tires are usually more expensive, they tend to wear better than any other top brand tire that I have tried. Also, as you can see by  this  experience, the service has usually been better with Michelin. Since we have lived in Albuquerque I have purchased replacement tires from Costco and take advantage of their free rotate &  balance service every 6-10K miles to prolong the life of the  tires. I really appreciated the service I got from Costco & Michelin.

Although there isn’t much visible yet, a lot has been accomplished here. Initially I set out to design this site using WordPress for the blog side and NetObjects Fusion to implement a more traditional website with an easy transition between the two. I did a lot of experimenting and came up with a nice design, but then realized that WordPress was more than adequate for handling the entire site. So I simply deleted everything and started over. Subsequent posts will touch on  some of the lessons learned.

Recently I obtained Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing 2.0 software and signed up for a 2-day workshop in Las Vegas this Sunday & Monday, 5/31 & 6/1. I am driving to Las Vegas tomorrow so need to get some sleep. Still have a lot to do before leave in the morning.