I Feel Poor

Last week we took the BMW (pronounced bay em doob-le-vay) to have the mirror fixed. (You know, the one I broke when it smacked against someone else's mirror?). When it was ready, Dave asked me to drop him off at Garage Raymondou.

On the way to the garage we were having a discussion about how diesel (gazol) fuel (sold by the litre) is so great and even though it is expensive to fill up the car here (and even though gazol being dispensed gives off a smell so bad that it makes you feel faint), we don't have to do it very often. Dave remarked that the Trafic gets great gas mileage and we have not had to fill the tank since we drove through Lyon in late August. I gently reminded him that I DETEST driving the Trafic (since it's basically the equivalent of a school bus) and the only reason we haven't had to fill the tank is because I only drive the BMW. "Which reminds me, I said, the gas light went on yesterday, so we need to fill it up again."

I dropped Dave off and drove directly home, although the route is LESS than direct! Lots of speed bumps and hills. I often feel nauseous driving here, and I am not even pregnant! Thank goodness for that, by the way.

I had been home for fifteen minutes or so (enough time to be seriously involved in a game of Goober's Lab on Webkinz) when I received a call from Dave: "Hi, I ran out of gas." He told me he was on his way to fill up the car when it sputtered and died, and that he had managed to push the car out of the road into the parking lot of Chez Franck, a pizza place. "Can you bring the gas can and come get me?"

I had to laugh, because there was only one time in my life that I have run out of gas. I was in high school and was driving myself to church because my family had already left. I had this REALLY old truck that was given to me by a family for whom I used to babysit. I loved having the independence of this truck, but there was a rust hole in the floor and it occasionally took twenty minutes to get the engine to turn over. I had just crested a small hill in the road and as I began the descent I could feel the truck lose power. So strange to go from power and control to coasting. Anyway, I managed to coast all the way into the parking lot of a gas station very close to the church. I just left it there. Nobody was going to steal that hunk of junk. It had holes in the floorboards. You could literally see glimpses of the ground below as you drove around. I'm not kidding.

But I digress . . . I picked up Dave and we filled up the gas can, as well as the Trafic. I snapped this picture of the gas pump after I filled up the Trafic, but before the gas can. By the time we filled up the BMW again, we were feeling really, really poor. Keep in mind that one euro equals 1.4186 dollars! Do the math.