Tires are frequently a forgotten aspect of bicycle maintenance and this is what happens when you don’t check them regularly:
First you wear a little hole in your tread: 
Then your usually indestructible Mr. Tuffy tire liner wears through: 
Then your tube blows out while you’re speeding down Don Mills Road:
And finally, you call your better half to come and rescue you from the 2-hour walk home.
I can’t complain, though; I knew the tire was nearing the end of its useful life but ignored the now-obvious warnings through a couple of rides. Since 2003, this set of tires had seen about 12,000 km on concrete, asphalt, sand, rocks, dirt, mud, grass, loose gravel, snow, ice, slush, and pretty much every other surface you could encounter in southern Ontario and I’d been planning since the spring to replace them anyway. As usual, I just needed that extra little push to actually get the work done.