My wife and I like to think of ourselves as reasonably experienced caravanners. We’ve done enough trips to know which campsite neighbours will invite you for a drink and which will let their dog bark until midnight. What we apparently hadn’t mastered, as of March this year, was listening to our tyres.

We were camped at a gorgeous piece-of-paradise property in Ngunguru — the kind of Northland estuary village that makes you wonder why anyone lives anywhere else. The van was parked up at a gorgeous PoP, the camp chairs were out, and the evening was doing that warm, golden Northland thing where everything just feels slightly too good to be real.

Then we heard it. A dull pop somewhere in the neighbourhood of our van. We did the dutiful caravan owner thing: put down our drinks, walked around the rig, peered at the tyres, kicked a couple. Everything looked fine. We shrugged, picked up our drinks again, and filed it under “probably a branch.”

“We did the dutiful caravan owner thing: walked around the rig, peered at the tyres, kicked a couple. Everything looked fine.”

The next day we left the van at the park-over property and headed further up the coast in the car (Tutukaka and Whale Bay) — one of the great luxuries of caravanning, having a base to explore from. Lovely day. No tyre-related drama whatsoever.

Saturday morning, we’re packing up to head further north. I unhitch the car, walk to the van to do the pre-departure checks, and there it is: one tyre sitting noticeably lower than its three companions. Not flat-flat. Just flat enough to be unmistakably, undeniably wrong.

Now, here’s where the geography becomes important. We were in Ngunguru, heading north — away from towns, further into beautiful-but-remote Northland. No worries if it’s a weekday. But it was a Saturday, and tyre shops in smaller Northland towns can be non-existent and definitely without a full range of tyres.

What followed was a frenzied hour of phone calls. We needed a specific tyre — our caravan runs a slightly unusual size — and most places either didn’t stock it or couldn’t fit us in before noon when most closed. We finally tracked down a shop in Whangarei that had one in stock and could squeeze us in, but only just. They’d be closing in 60 minutes and they wanted us to do the tyre change as they didn’t have room for our rig on their forecourt.

We removed the tyre ourselves in a scramble — not exactly the relaxed Northland morning we’d pictured — and made it to Whangarei with minutes to spare. New tyre fitted. Crisis averted. Holiday resumed.

But here’s what played on my mind later, once the adrenaline wore off: the tyre had almost certainly started losing pressure on Thursday evening. That was the pop we heard — the tyre man suggested the pop was the pressure forcing a sharp object from the tyre. A slow leak, not a blowout — the kind that takes two days to become obvious. We drove past Whangarei on the Thursday on our way to Ngunguru and it was likely losing pressure then. We could have stopped, sorted it in twenty minutes at any number of tyre shops that were open on a weekday, and continued north without a care.

Instead, we had a mildly awful Saturday morning, a panicked drive, and a very rushed tyre change at the PoP amongst other bemused campers. Not the end of the world. But entirely avoidable.

“We drove past Whangarei on Thursday. On a weekday, this would have been a twenty-minute stop. We didn’t know we needed to make it.”

A TPMS — a tyre pressure monitoring system — would have changed the whole story. The moment that tyre started leaking on Thursday evening, we’d have seen an alert. We’d have known exactly which tyre and roughly how quickly it was losing pressure. We could have made an informed decision: keep an eye on it overnight, or swing past a tyre shop in Whangarei on Friday before we headed further out. Either way, we’d be in control of the situation rather than scrambling to catch up with it on a Saturday morning.

For caravanners in New Zealand specifically — where you’re often a fair distance from the nearest town with a decent tyre shop — that kind of early warning isn’t just convenient. It genuinely changes what options you have. The window between “slow leak starting” and “too late to sort it conveniently” can be a matter of hours. Hours that, in our case, happened to include a Friday night and a Saturday morning.

We’ve since fitted a TPMS to the van. It monitors pressure and temperature across all four sensors in real time, and the display sits on the dash where I can glance at it while driving. Mostly it just quietly confirms that everything is fine. Occasionally it’ll flag a pressure drop — usually just temperature-related as the tyres warm up, but the point is I know. And knowing early means choosing, rather than reacting.

Ngunguru is still one of our favourite spots. We’re going back. But next time, if a tyre decides to start misbehaving on a Thursday evening, I’d rather know about it on Thursday evening.