I have been road tripping and have stories to share. Many stories. I realized that this blog was started well after the bulk of my road trip adventures, so I think I am going to start some sort of weekly thing where I rehash some of the better stories. Mostly, this is a way of forcing myself to revive this blog. (Although, I swear to you have been blogging like a maniac over at SnarkSquad.com and those posts take a ridiculous amount of time. Even the posts where I am a contributor and not the main writer take longer than most of what I write here.)

It’s even more important for me to do this, because I was added to a list of cool travel blogs for Easy Voyage. Cool travel blogs! This means I have to keep traveling. And blogging.

Any-pointless-introduction-way: I drove out to California two weeks ago, to begin exciting wedding planning with my best friend and my cousin, and to begin the moving west process. (And oh, is it a process.)

The trip out there was relatively uneventful for the first twenty hours. I didn’t get pulled over, and found a good creepy gas station to park at to sleep for 90 minutes. I downloaded an audiobook of The Great Gatsby, and other than the fact that the lines between “phone calls with actual people” and “conversations from my audiobook” got a little muddled in my head, all was uneventful. (Later in the week someone mentioned getting a massage. I thought to myself, “Who was it that was just telling me about all the stuff she had to do and how one of them was getting a massage and also she was super annoying?” And then I realized that this did not happen; I was thinking of Myrtle Wilson.)

Sure enough, I was more than halfway through Arizona when my car made its little dinging noise to alert me to the fact that I had 50 miles left until empty. There was a truck stop coming up just as this happened, but for some reason I didn’t stop there. And then there just weren’t any more gas stations. What followed was a good sixtyish miles of occasionally hilly, entirely deserty (don’t you give me those red squiggles, Chrome; totally legit word usage here) nothingness. For most people, this error might be excusable, but I have made this trip several dozen times and know its gas stations well. I have had a couple near misses on that stretch of road before. I should have known better.

Miles after the dashboard insisted “0 Miles To E,” I was going through a hilly area and waiting for the hill that I would be unable to clear. Sure enough, the last steep one did me in. I got very near the top before my car just said, “Nope, that’s it. Nothing left.” For all my road tripping and road mishaps, my experience with running out of gas is limited. I have only actually run out once — while driving back to the hotel from Coachella last year, and I was in the lane to turn into the gas station and had a car full of people to push the car. A few years back my sister and I came close to running out on this MO-CA trip, so I parked and waited for my free roadside assistance rather than chancing the actual running out of gas. All of this is to say, that I was moderately amused by hearing my car make this new and unpleasant puttering sound as it tried to pull us over that hill.

As an added bonus, there was no cell reception there. There would be no gas but what I could go and retrieve myself. I knew there was nothing behind me for miles, so I had the brilliant idea to grab some water bottles and start walking forward. I didn’t get more than 100 feet before it occurred to me that (1) I had no idea where the next gas station would be -and- (2) I also realized there was construction about a mile and a half behind me and construction meant people who are not driving and might know how to communicate with the outside world.

So I marched back in the noontime desert heat. I was honked at by a car of what appeared to be teenagers, and that was swell. By swell I mean that it startled the shit out of me and I hate those kids. Same thing.

When I reached the construction workers I had to stand there awkwardly and wait for them to stop and notice I was there because I knew I couldn’t make enough noise to be heard over the machine and was certainly not stupid enough to get close to it either. They looked up and sent one guy over to talk to me while the others kept working.

I explained my predicament and pointed up ahead to where my car was, though you couldn’t see it from where we were. I asked if they had phones I could borrow.

“Well, we do, but we have the same problem as you. No reception. We do have a two-gallon can of gas, though.” He called to the guy who sent him over to me to make sure it was all right.

I was so happy I thought I might cry. Up to that point, I hadn’t thought about the fact that I’d been stranded in the sun for an hour and that this was a wee bit stressful. Solving the problem took precedent over panicking. I started to offer up my giant water bottle for him to pour the gas into and send me in on my merry way. But then! Then my magical-road-side-wizard became a millionty times more amazing by driving me back to my car, with me thanking him profusely every four seconds.

About half of it spilled in the pouring, so it was only about a gallon, but a gallon more than I’d previously had. What’s more, he mentioned that they had trucks going all along this road and he’d tell the next one that came by to keep an eye out for me, in case I didn’t make it to the gas station that was about thirteen miles down the road (so, yeah, walking for gas probably wouldn’t have been wise).

He told me to keep the car in neutral going downhill, promised to wait until I had set off to head back, and then sent me on my way. For all the cautionary tales, there are as many wonderful helpful people out there. It would have been better to, you know, not run out of gas, but this is part of why I’d rather err on the side of not assuming everyone else in the world is secretly out to get me.

I emailed my circle of amazing bloggy friends about this saga, and someone replied with a sort of congratulations and said that she probably would have cried. For that, too, I guess I’m glad to have been stranded in strange places as often as I have. If you find a way out of enough such situations, you eventually learn that there is always a solution; you just have to find it.

In this case I’d say it’s probably putting gas in your car when it tells you to. That’s what I learned. Cars need gas. Go figure.