When I was 16, I had a '78 Mercury Cougar land yacht. My friends and I were driving back from suburban malls to our rural homes at 70 MPH in the left lane of an interstate, when I blew a tire. After a harrowing several seconds getting the car off the road on the right shoulder, I went back and saw the sidewall was completely blown out and shredded. No "Fix-A-Flat" for this job.
I hadn't had the car (or my license) very long, having bought the car a few months prior from an old guy for 700 bucks. I knew it had a spare tire, but I never really took a close look at it until just then...for some reason, even though the wheels on the car were 15-inchers, the spare was a 14-inch wheel. Hoo-ray.
Seeing as how we were two miles from the next exit, it was the hottest day of the summer, and my friends aren't the most athletic in the world, and even in an emergency walking on the side of the interstate isn't the greatest idea ever devised, we decided to sit and wait for a patrol car (it's 1994, and Midwestern teenagers getting cell phones was a phenomenon that was still years away). I mean, it's I-65 in southern Indiana...there's a police car every 100 feet when you're doing 1 mile over the speed limit.
Well, we sat there for an hour and didn't see a single police car, which I'd like to have happen when I'm actually moving one of these days. Tempers were wearing thin, as were our liquid rations, which had consisted of a half-full 20 ounce bottle of RC cola. I said screw it, I'm trying the 14-inch spare. Miraculously, I managed to wedge it over the rear drum and position it so it didn't rub against it (if it had been a front tire, it wouldn't have fit over the caliper of the front disc). So we lopsidedly limped mostly on the shoulder to the next exit (where upon exiting the freeway we immediately came across a 3rd-gen Camaro in Sheriff's hi-po livery, of course), and somehow made our way home from there, even though the area at that exit was terra incognita to us.
So yeah...check your emergency stuff often
