Back in 1992 I moved with my live-in boyfriend down South. This was before I had a computer. So each night on the road I wrote a letter to one of my friends I had left back in Massachusetts. While that was fun, and I really tried to tell EVERY SINGLE adventure, but . . . I have no records of what I wrote. At least now I can write it down in our blog or our Facebook pages and they will be there for a really really long time. Okay, maybe not. But I want to record every single adventure; large and small.

For instance, once on that trip so many years ago we realized that we were getting very low on gas. We were towing a 14 foot bass boat and that really cut down on our mileage severely.

Well, as luck would have it we did, in fact, run out of gas somewhere in Pennsylvania. We were able to pull over to the side of the road but . . .”what are we going to do now?” were those very words as we both spoke at the same time. After a number of worrying minutes I said something like “there is gas in the boat”. We looked at each other like we were nuts. Which we were but the truth is that was a great idea!

Now . . . how the heck do we get it from the boat which was then over 14 feet away from our gas tank?

Siphon!! (into what?) Wait, there was a bait pail in the boat itself. But there was a boat cover stretched over the entire boat. If I could just crawl up there and loosen it enough to crawl inside and see . . .

Rats. No flashlight. How was I going to see anything in that boat with the cover still tightly on it? And we were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike with cars whizzing by us at 70 miles an hour. Every time a car passed the boat would sway side to side. But here is crazy Ginny crawling up into a wrapped boat in the middle of the turnpike. I had found a small flashlight that you would hang on your keys to find a lock. But that’s all I had. Just as I was about to slip under the tarp and get into the boat a state trooper comes screeching up with siren blasting. You never saw a woman move as fast as I did. He came over and wanted to know “what the hell are you people doing?”

We told him that we ran out of gas and what we were planning on doing. He just sort of shook his head and said he would park behind us with his flashers on so no other stupid person ran into us.

So up into the boat I went. I couldn’t really remember exactly where the bait pail was but I finally found it. Right now I can’t remember what we used for the siphoning hose but I do remember the horrible taste and smell of that first swish of gas. Yuch!

But I got enough into that little pail to put in the car to get us to the nearest gas station.

What I remember most fondly is the trooper sitting in his cruiser shaking his head now and then at the stupidity of those folks from Massachusetts!

Luckily, we didn’t stay down south very long. But it WAS an adventure!

So that’s the kind of silly story I want to write about on the Two Grannies trip.

GINNY . . . the older, funner, more adventurous Granny