Alternately titled: Adventures with Dave and Steph

Even an obsessive, neurotic, hyper responsible brain can fail you at times.

It was a dark (very dark!) and stormless night. The travelers were fresh and ready for adventure. The straight, flat, unending interstate stretched in front of them beckoning them to places far beyond.

Then the children got hungry.

So the travelers, far from weary, stop and get some nourishment for their wee passengers and are quickly on their way again. (Do you see anything wrong yet?)

On, on, on they go. In the darkness, at high speeds, at night, in the middle of nowhere land.

The driver appears to begin driving erratically and swerves behind a large truck. The vehicle sounds odd and a strained look is on the drivers face. "What's wrong?" I ask anxiously. "Hang on!" The driver answers as he veers the vehicle off the road and up against the guardrail of a bridge. The car turns off and the lights go dark. At night. In the dark. On a bridge. In the middle of nowhere.

"The car is dead." The driver comments calmly. "Duh!!!" My brain races, thankfully silently." "But why, how, to what extent and how can we make it go again?" I continue. Still silently.

I find my voice as the children begin asking the words that are in my head. "What happened?" "Why did we stop?" "Where ARE we?"

As we sit in the darkened car, with traffic whizzing by only three feet from us, rocking and shaking the car, we realize the truth. We have run out of gas. Us! The obsessive always-get-gas-when-we-stop-to-get-food people. And it is night. And very dark. No moon. No houses. No streetlights. On a bridge. Rocking with the traffic. In the middle of nowhere.

The driver remembers that little number on the back of your driver's license that will send the DPS to the aid of stranded motorists. I get out my license and begin to call. The driver stops me and gently breaks it to me that we have no idea where we are other than the fact that we are on I45 somewhere between Dallas and Houston. And that we have been driving for a while. Not a very narrow search parameter.

As the traffic passes, we can just see a mile marker up past the bridge we are on and up on the next hill illuminated by headlights as they pass. When the traffic passes, it is gone again. The driver takes a deep breath and reaches for the door handle. He speaks. "I am going to go find the mile maker so we can tell them where to find us." I panic. "What? And leave me alone with the children? At night? In the dark? In the whizzing traffic? In the middle of nowhere? And you jogging on a bridge next to the traffic in the dark? Aaaaaaaaah!"

"We need to find out where we are. Keep the doors locked! I'll be back as soon as I can." And at the first break in traffic, he is gone. We begin to pray and watch. We can only see our beloved driver when the cars pass closely to him. Too closely for me. Then we cannot see him at all. Minutes seem to stretch in to hours, months, years, millennia. We continue to pray and sit very upright in our seatbelts.

After millions of years, He is back! Panting and gasping he slings himself back into the car. I want data, but he wants albuterol. He puffs and coughs and I impatiently wait. He is finally able to tell me and I call that little number (very thankful for the technology of cellular phones), hoping it works. A cheery DPS dispatcher answers and says she will send an officer my way.

So we wait. But it seems easier now. We know help is on the way and our driver is back. We begin to try to figure out what went wrong. We conclude that we are both spacey dingbats and leave it at that. We sit very straight in our seatbelts Remember the closely whizzing traffic flying right next to us at 75+mph. On a bridge. At night. In the dark. In the middle of nowhere.

After a Looooong time, Two DPS officers arrive. Their lights are on and as if miraculously, all the whizzing traffic moves over a lane and the car stops swaying and shaking. We relax and our driver gets out of our car. The officers begin to talk with the driver about the high cost of gas and just-trying-to-make-it-to-the-next-town stories to make him feel better. He replies, with a grin "Nope! My fault. We just forgot to get gas at our last stop. (or any of the other ones for that matter) No good story here." They say they are sending a wrecker with gasoline. And they leave.

Nooooooooo! The moment they leave, the cars move back to the lane beside us and the car rocks and sways with the rhythm of the road again. We are back to sitting upright in our seatbelts. On a bridge. At night. In the dark. In the middle of nowhere. Traffic flying by.

Almost exactly one hour after that first call, the wrecker arrives with the gas. It was exorbitantly expensive (think upwards of $12/gallon) but we thought it cheap at any price. Our driver turned the key and the car roared to life. A glorious sound!

We then called Grandma and told her we would be a little late and we would tell her the whole story when we got there. The remainder of the trip was uneventful. We spent most of our time checking the fuel gauge compulsively and thinking up ways to not EVER let this happen again. Thankfully Grandma is a night owl and was much perkier than we were upon arrival.

Posted by stephanie at March 15, 2006 07:59 AM