We set off in the afternoon to drive to Maryland where we would meet up with our friend from Ohio and we were going to trade Beetles. We had her 1973 VW that was worth a fortune, and she was bringing our 1974 Beetle. We’d arranged to meet, at her insistence, in Frederick MD, because it is exactly 6 hours driving for each of us.
Everything was going great guns until Kaz said that we should get gas as we were down to a couple of gallons left. No worries, I thought, we were on I-95 and gas stations abounded so we’d just take the next gas exit and fill up. Soon we saw a Citgo logo on the Rocky Mount exit sign so we made for it, expecting to drive into a gas station just off the interstate, as you do. I should have been suspicious of the sign as Hugo Chavez owns Citgo, and everyone knows what he thinks of America. We were starting to have doubts as we pulled off the exit from I-95. We thought that maybe we had exited too early as we had seen a huge Citgo sign, but now we couldn’t find a gas station.
Finally after 10 miles driving on Hwy 64 East and taking another exit we were in Rocky Mount and ready to fuel up. Weird place to put a gas station, we thought, 10 miles from I-95. To exacerbate this, the afore-mentioned Citgo sign turned out to be just a storage site. Then we rejoiced too soon when we finally found gas stations after driving around a while, because every gas station we drove into was out of gas. “Dang” I said, “I didn’t know we had a shortage here in NC as well.”
My wife assured me that the hurricane was indeed far reaching and we’d have to try to find a station that had gas. We persevered until finally we drove into a station that didn’t have the hoses covered in plastic because there was no more gas. And so, having found a place that had gas we drove in and parked next to the pump. I fulfilled my husbandly duty and grabbed the Regular hose and proceeded to fill up the car.
With a full tank then we drove out again and I remarked that the gas I’d pumped was $3.99 per gallon when the prominent sign had said that gas was only $3.77 per gallon. I quite seriously told my wife that if we had more time I’d have reported them to the authorities for price gouging and charging too much for gas. She said, “yeah you go get em honey!”
As we drove off back towards the I-95 though we noticed that the car seemed a little sluggish as we accelerated, oh well, we thought it’d work itself out. The car stalled at the traffic lights but we started up again and powered off towards the freeway but something was definitely wrong. As we drove up towards Hwy 64 East our power dropped off and we pulled onto a shoulder at an exit ramp onto Hwy 64. Being the man in the situation I jumped into the breach immediately and grabbed the ‘torch’ or ‘flashlight’ as it’s called here in America. I opened the ‘bonnet’ or ‘hood’, in American and shone the light into the ‘motor’, which luckily is also the ‘motor’ in America .
However, I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for, but I still looked as if I expected the damaged part to leap out at me and say, ‘Look, here I am, I am broken, fix me and Bob’s your uncle.’ Well that didn’t happen so I asked my wife to start it up again and smoke poured out of the exhausts like we were burning pure oil, hmm I thought. The gas station did say their gas was $3.77 and the pump said $3.99, uh oh. So I sheepishly said to Kaz, “Err honey, we did put gas in the car eh, Diesel pumps are separate from gas pumps in Aussie gas stations, they are here too aren’t they?”
“Well,” she said, “the sign did say, $3.77 for gas, let’s see the receipt.” Well a quick check of the receipt showed that we had indeed pumped 8 gallons of DS into the GAS tank. Now I have done some dumb things in my life but this took the cake, imagine putting diesel into a gas car, how moronic is that. I tried to use the defense that the pump had no markings on it identifying it as a diesel pump but my wife tried to be diplomatic about it by saying that it was as much her fault as mine, and that we were so excited to find a gas station that actually had gas, that we didn’t notice.
