New Tires for a Late Winter -- In June

Well, it's STILL raining in Northern California on June 4. This is just plain weird. In any case, it made me reconsider replacing the front tires on my wife's car. You really want to have some tread on your tires on wet roads so the water has somewhere to go and you still have some rubber touching the surface. Otherwise you are at a risk of hydroplaning and getting into an accident. I didn't want that for my loved ones.

There's an old informal gauge of using a penny to see if Lincoln's head is visible -- or something--I know that the entire head was completely visible. The tread looked like a drawing on the tire.

So, what do you do? I looked online and saw that some local places had bad Yelp reviews. Then, I remembered good experiences I had before with a local company, so I went there. I arrived just when the door opened at 7:30 a.m. and was 3rd in line. Sure enough, the friendly and efficient folks there found me a good pair for the fronts (the backs were still good--and they told me so and didn't try to sell me something I didn't need). Also, they provided me with good tires for significantly less than the exact replacement models. Then, they put them on in half an hour.

I then went home and brought over one of my other cars that had a slow leak. After using my $15 quickie compressor to fill the offending tire, I drove over. As they have done before, they fixed the leak--for free--and topped off my coolant, which I told them looked like it was running low.

Finding good businesses you can count on to do the job right at a good price isn't easy. If you need tires, go see them if you're in the neighborhood:

Castro Valley Tire Pros