357 miles

Our new used car has a broken gas gauge. We agreed that at 300 miles, we always fill up. Always. Tonight on the way home, we discovered that the car goes about 357 miles on a tank of gas.

I can only laugh. Doug and I got to talking about other times this has happened as he brought back a loaner can from the Gulf station around the corner that we tried to roll to, but decided to use gravity and downhill slopes to get us into a safe parking lot.

I had a car in college with a broken gas gauge and meticulously measured out the miles, unless someone borrowed my car to drive it for 10 miles round trip to Nick's Roast beef and then I thought I had enough gas to get to work in Gloucester and I'd run out...

Then there were times that we weren't the ones running out of gas. Were driving to my parents one day, in the heat of summer,  and we came across some guys on the side of the road stopped so Doug decided we should stop and help them. They were not all that with it, headed southbound when they wanted to be headed to Maine. They weren't thrilled when they found out they were on their way to NYC and not the northern kingdom.  They were out of gas, so we offered to help.

We drove them down the highway in Connecticut to the next exit. We went to the gas station and the man at the station would not let us borrow a gas can. We assured him we'd return it, and drive these guys back down to fill all the way up.

The man was insistent, so Doug decided "screw you" and bought a glass container of orange juice. Mind you, you can't put gas into a plastic container, it melts the plastic... so an approved gas can or a glass or metal container is what you need.

The glass container was a gallon. And he popped the top off of it and started to drink it. I took a sip, and the not too with it dudes were all "oh man, you're not gonna drink all that are you?!" Doug said "Hell yeah." The guy suggested we pour it out, and Doug said "no way! I paid for this! I'm drinking it!" So he did. We filled the container, got back in the northbound lane and headed back so we could get to their car. The gallon of gas was just the ticket, and they got it started happily. Doug handed them some money, and we got on our way. We saw them again at the gas station, where we stopped so Doug could pee out the gallon of orange juice and they could fuel up. Laughing.

There are a lot of stories like this for Doug and Chris. I'm glad we can laugh at them.