As most of you know from our earlier posts, the gas gauge on the rv does not work. It does move around sometimes but it never reflects how much gas we actually have. There has been a few times on this trip that we have thought we ran out of gas, but so far Grand Canyon was the only place it actually happened….until yesterday.

If any of you have ever been to Nevada, not including Los Vegas, you would know how bad our situation was. After my last post when we hung out in that McDonalds for 4 hours, we bought 38 dollars worth of gas. The gas pump clicked off so we thought we were good to go. We had been filling up intermittently when gas prices looked good.

I am driving while Chris is fixing things all over the inside of the rv. We are going though the desert and mountain ranges of Nevada where every ten miles or so, you might see an unmarked dirt road. We drive for almost an hour and then see a sign that says next gas 71 miles. (We hadn’t seen a gas station in our first hour of driving). We think nothing of it because we thought we had a full tank of gas…opppssiees, we were wrong.

The rv started skipping when I would push on the gas petal and then all of a sudden, the accelerator wouldn’t go anymore. I yell out to Chris and he comes up to the front and gets in the drivers seat. We couldn’t even pull off the road because there was a 4 or 5 foot drop on each side covered with gravel. We coasted until we completely stopped; we were parked in the road in the middle of NO WHERE.

Here is where the next problem comes in, that gas tank we are supposed to keep on the back for these situations has only less than a gallon in it; meaning we could only get 10 miles or so on that.

Another problem; we have zero cell phone and internet service. Yes I do have aaa but that doesn’t help if you can’t call them to bring out extra gas to you.

And one last problem; the nearest gas station is 65 miles each way. We used the GPS to try and figure out where we could drive the dirt bike to and fill up the gas tank. Well not only is a 130 mile round trip a long time to be on the dirt bike, but the 5 gallon tank won’t even get us all the way to the gas stations.

How does someone get out of this situation?? Well I don’t know about normal people but Chris and I loaded up our under a gallon in extra gas and started the rv. We were hoping that we could at least get off the road to prevent an accident. It takes a minute or so to start up because we were so empty. Chris starts moving again wheennn……

We see a small factory and a few trucks on the right hand side. They had a parking lot that we could pull over in and maybe get a landline to call for help. This was the first building we had seen since we left the small town so we were sooooo lucky that we ran out of gas right there. You might think that’s the end but there is more…

This happened to be a factory that made gasoline. (Yes I know that is not the official term, refinery for crude oil ect. Just accept it for the point of the story) Who runs out of gas right in front of a gas factory??? We walk in the building and meet a young guy named Bruce who just happened to be filling up one of the company cars to go into town. He said even though they are completely not allowed to give any gas to non employees, he agrees to give us a few gallons after filling up his car. Then another employee pulls in needed gas so Bruce said he would give us a couple gallons from his fill up too.

We were saved. After we got 8 gallons of the freshest gas this old rv has ever had in it. We tried to offer Bruce some money for the gas to pay for it or at least so he can buy a case of beer or something on us. He refuses and said it was the right thing to do to help us out.

Chris and I were so astonished that this actually happened to us. We got back on the road and made it to the gas station with plenty to spare (although it took us almost 200 dollars to fill it back up) In that little town we got some Mexican food and then drove another 80 miles to an rv park for the night where we got to take SHOWERS. (you would be that excited too if you had to sit next to us in a restaurant) We are currently in Utah, about 5 hours from Moab, and plan on spending tonight and tomorrow night there. Hopefully we stay out of trouble for those couple hours and don’t worry, we will pay WAY more attention to the gas level after that scare.