Get a Grip

My first stop of the morning pretty much set the tone for the day. I’m telling you – if you have to buy tires for your car or truck or whatever, you should do yourself a favour and get them at Tireland in North Vancouver.

I don’t work for them, don’t even know them personally. I have had outstanding service there before, and these days, that counts for everything.

With the write-off of our Jeep, we’re counting on our fabulous red Yaris to do double duty – the mighty little Toyota is going to be spending many a weekend driving up (and hopefully down) the Cypress Bowl road and we expect nothing but the best performance. I’m going to miss the comfort of 4 wheel drive, but in the absence of the four-by, I want some decent tires underfoot.

So off I went to pick up some brand new Michelin X-ICE XI2 tires – and lucky to get ’em too.

There’s a real shortage of winter tires this year, due to a bunch of different circumstances, including a new law requiring ground grips in the province of Quebec.

As I’ve done before, I called Paul at Tireland on the North Shore yesterday, and he managed to find a set of Michelins for me – the only reason they had any is that we’ve got 14 inch tires on the Yaris instead of the more popular 15’s. But the great thing is Paul searched his stock and what he could get brought in, and had a couple of other recommendations for me, with a lot of information about the pros and cons of each tire and how they could be expected to perform.

The little red car is now equipped with some great winter tires – I had a wonderful start to me day even though I dropped a fair bit of money (hey, interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years). They thing is, I got amazing service, they took my car in on time and had it out on time, and still gave me a bit of a discount.

Now if we could only get some snow…’cause the local mountains are looking pretty bare.

3 thoughts on “Get a Grip”

  1. You call them “ground grips”! No one calls them that out here, do they? My grandfather called them that. Must be a prairie thing.

    All of the references I can find (online) to “ground grip” tires are to Firestone implement tires. I am guessing you heard your dad or granddad call them ground grip tires, which may have been “cross over” word use in farming communities.

    Possible? Probable?

  2. Ground Grips. Every Manitoban knows that around about October 15th it’s the time to haul the ground grips out of the shed and take ’em down to the Co-Op service station and get’em installed (eh).

    I wonder if it WAS a cross-over term – probably, since there’s no ‘ground’ to grip in a Manitoba winter – just snow and ice.

    But my entire life growing up (in Manitoba until I escaped to Alberta at 19) I knew them as Ground Grips – and about the only exception: ‘studded Ground Grips’.

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