Today’s funny story of the day actually happened about a year ago. We moved here to the Dominican Republic, and we were renting a scooter, and, um, you know, it was new. It’s this Chinese something or other, and as I found out, I didn’t really understand the gas gauge. I thought I knew the gas gauge, but I didn’t know the gas gage. I thought E was F and F was E. As I was driving around I was thinking, “oh, I’ve got plenty of gas. This is great!”
I’m heading over to Bayahibe, a town nearby, with my pregnant wife and my toddler piled on the back. We had been driving the scooter for a few weeks already and I thought to myself, “This is lasting forever! But it’s a motorcycle, they get great gas mileage.” It’s about a five minute drive from here to the next little town. We were driving around, getting a few things done. I look down and my gauge and a turn to my wife and say “oh yeah! We’ve got plenty of gas. It’s on full. Wow! It’s lasting forever” We get to the top of the hill, and it suddenly shuts off. Oh no.
We discovered in that moment that it was, in fact, empty, not full. It’s ok though, there is a gas station at the bottom of the hill. I turn around with my wife and kid at the top of this hill and we start coasting down. The tank was completely dry; it had nothing left. We let gravity carry us in and we just barely make it! We celebrated. We pull up to the pump and in Spanish I say, “Hey, can you fill me?” He says, “this is a propane station.” I thought “Noooo!! I don’t have any gas. What do you mean is a propane station?” He continued. “Now, the gas station, that’s up the hill the other way. You gotta go up that hill.”
And I say, “oh my gosh, how far?”
We had just recently arrived to the country. I didn’t really know where things were, and I didn’t know how anything worked. I’ve never filled up before. He looks at me for a minute and then he says, “you know what, give me a minute”. He comes back about 2 minutes later with a plastic Coke bottle full of gas. I was thinking, “Where the heck did this guy get this gas from?” He puts it in my tank (which I didn’t even know how to access on the scooter) I still couldn’t get it started with the electric start. He props it up on the kickstand, pushes down on the the manual starter, pumps it and pumps it and it finally starts up.
There was another guy who was getting propane in his car, because some of the cars run on propane here.
The other guy says I said, you know, I work at the gas station. Just follow me, I’ll show you where it is.
And as I was heading off, I asked the attendant. “Where did you get the gas?”
And he tells me
“Well, I just pulled it out of my own motorcycle. “
So the guy siphoned gas out of his own bike, gave it to me. And then helped me connect with the gas station attendant, who just happened to be getting propane in his car, so I could follow him up to the gas station, and I fill it up. And it was so awesome!
This is the beauty of the people here that is so understated. They will do things like that for people. He didn’t want anything. He was just trying to help me. He felt bad that I pulled all the way down and I was going to be stuck, so he siphoned gas out of his own motorcycle, poured it into my tank, worked extra hard to start mine up, and sent me off with a gas station attendant. I don’t know if this story is funny, (I suppose my stupidity and ignorance is kind of funny) but it certainly has touching element.
This is one of these moments of, “how did I get here? This is crazy.“ I am in another country, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know how to get to a gas station, let alone that there’s even such thing as a propane gas station. We don’t even have them in the United States. This is amazing, and just part of the beauty of living here.