Life Lesson!

Last week was a "gag me" week. I just don't have any other words for it.

Basically, if it could go wrong with our move, it did. I just didn't have enough hours in the day to compete with all the things going wrong to finish all that we had to do. (As a result we are going on night 5 that we're camping out at my Dads trying to get our house set up enough to actually live there...)

So, come Thursday we had planned to go to the State Fair, but after such a crazy week I was honestly regretting scheduling the fair so close to the move. Despite the crazy week, we really enjoyed our time at the fair! It was about 4:00 pm and we knew that there was a bad storm rolling in and Cora had about all the fair fun she could handle so we headed out, rushing to get to the van before the storm hit. 

A little back story... we were running late to meet our family at the fair, we'd planned to take the train in but we missed the train so we decided to drive the rest of the way to Fair Park so we'd get there about the time they would arrive. Just a few miles out from Fair Park the dang gas light went off on the van, we just figured we'd grab some gas as we left that evening.

Fast Forward, we're leaving Fair Park just ahead of the storm. Turns out that there just aren't many gas stations in the Fair Park area (it's not the nicest neighborhood...) so we figured that surely there would be some on the way home. GPS routed us through downtown because traffic on I30 was so backed up, unfortunately traffic in Downtown Dallas wasn't a walk in the park either. As we scooted along in traffic I was watching the gas gauge needle drop lower & lower. I was getting really antsy for a gas station but there just weren't any very close to us and traffic was crawling.

Now the storm has moved in... we were sitting in stand still traffic, I was snapping at my Dad and John that we had to find a gas station or they could push the van in this torrential downpour. As we sat there stuck at an intersection huge debris started falling around us from a highrise building on our left that was under construction. I was frantic and my nerves were frazzled. 

We finally find a RaceTrac, the first gas station we've seen in miles, I coast up to a pump on fumes and my Dad chimes in from the back seat "I've got a bad feeling about this..."

What???? The pumps were dark, the store was dark, all the stores around us were dark... there was no electricity and the storm was still raging. 

We decided to sit there and ride out the storm, there just wasn't much of a choice. After the storm passed we talked to some employees of the next door auto parts store, they had been calling around to other gas stations in the area, none less than about 3/4 mile away... none of them had power either. We were stuck. To make me feel slightly better about it, no less than 8 other cars were in the same shoes as us, none of us had enough gas to get to another station that might have power. 

All in all, we waited for 3 hours for the power to be restored & to get gas. 

We bought a gas can with cash from the auto parts store and walked in the rain for miles only to find nada...

Cora had a blast crawling around the van getting into all kinds of trouble!

On the bright side, once power was restored thankfully my Dad had some cash (I never carry cash, but really should!) to pay to pump gas because the credit/debit card readers were still offline after power came back. The RaceTrac employees estimated at least an hour before that would come back up!

So the lesson out of this?? Never, ever, ever let your car get below a quarter tank! I'd heard this so many times before, but I just never imagined a situation that I couldn't just swing into a gas station and fill up. I learned the lesson the hard way, learn from me!