We set off in the afternoon to drive to Maryland where we would meet up with our friend from Ohio and we were going to trade Beetles. We had her 1973 VW that was worth a fortune, and she was bringing our 1974 Beetle. We’d arranged to meet, at her insistence, in Frederick MD, because it is exactly 6 hours driving for each of us.

Everything was going great guns until Kaz said that we should get gas as we were down to a couple of gallons left. No worries, I thought, we were on I-95 and gas stations abounded so we’d just take the next gas exit and fill up. Soon we saw a Citgo logo on the Rocky Mount exit sign so we made for it, expecting to drive into a gas station just off the interstate, as you do. I should have been suspicious of the sign as Hugo Chavez owns Citgo, and everyone knows what he thinks of America. We were starting to have doubts as we pulled off the exit from I-95. We thought that maybe we had exited too early as we had seen a huge Citgo sign, but now we couldn’t find a gas station.

Finally after 10 miles driving on Hwy 64 East and taking another exit we were in Rocky Mount and ready to fuel up. Weird place to put a gas station, we thought, 10 miles from I-95. To exacerbate this, the afore-mentioned Citgo sign turned out to be just a storage site. Then we rejoiced too soon when we finally found gas stations after driving around a while, because every gas station we drove into was out of gas. “Dang” I said, “I didn’t know we had a shortage here in NC as well.”

My wife assured me that the hurricane was indeed far reaching and we’d have to try to find a station that had gas. We persevered until finally we drove into a station that didn’t have the hoses covered in plastic because there was no more gas. And so, having found a place that had gas we drove in and parked next to the pump. I fulfilled my husbandly duty and grabbed the Regular hose and proceeded to fill up the car.

With a full tank then we drove out again and I remarked that the gas I’d pumped was $3.99 per gallon when the prominent sign had said that gas was only $3.77 per gallon. I quite seriously told my wife that if we had more time I’d have reported them to the authorities for price gouging and charging too much for gas. She said, “yeah you go get em honey!”

As we drove off back towards the I-95 though we noticed that the car seemed a little sluggish as we accelerated, oh well, we thought it’d work itself out. The car stalled at the traffic lights but we started up again and powered off towards the freeway but something was definitely wrong. As we drove up towards Hwy 64 East our power dropped off and we pulled onto a shoulder at an exit ramp onto Hwy 64. Being the man in the situation I jumped into the breach immediately and grabbed the ‘torch’ or ‘flashlight’ as it’s called here in America. I opened the ‘bonnet’ or ‘hood’, in American and shone the light into the ‘motor’, which luckily is also the ‘motor’ in America .

However, I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for, but I still looked as if I expected the damaged part to leap out at me and say, ‘Look, here I am, I am broken, fix me and Bob’s your uncle.’ Well that didn’t happen so I asked my wife to start it up again and smoke poured out of the exhausts like we were burning pure oil, hmm I thought. The gas station did say their gas was $3.77 and the pump said $3.99, uh oh. So I sheepishly said to Kaz, “Err honey, we did put gas in the car eh, Diesel pumps are separate from gas pumps in Aussie gas stations, they are here too aren’t they?”

“Well,” she said, “the sign did say, $3.77 for gas, let’s see the receipt.” Well a quick check of the receipt showed that we had indeed pumped 8 gallons of DS into the GAS tank. Now I have done some dumb things in my life but this took the cake, imagine putting diesel into a gas car, how moronic is that. I tried to use the defense that the pump had no markings on it identifying it as a diesel pump but my wife tried to be diplomatic about it by saying that it was as much her fault as mine, and that we were so excited to find a gas station that actually had gas, that we didn’t notice.

Now if we’d had a car that was 20 years old or less the diesel nozzle wouldn’t have fitted in the gas tank hole, but no, silly us had a VW that is 35 years old from a much simpler time when people actually took notice of what they put into their tank. Anyway here we were stuck in the middle of an exit ramp in the middle of the night outside of Rocky Mount in the pitch black of night. To make things worse it was starting to get cold and we were only dressed in T-shirts and jeans.

To combat the cold we put on whatever jackets we had in the car and huddled together to use body heat. Being the romantic type I used this opportunity of being cheek to cheek to dance a bit. Well I like dancing! We must have been quite a sight to passing cars, standing there on the traffic island in front of a broken down beetle and dancing a slow waltz cheek to cheek. After about an hour waiting and dancing the AAA tow truck arrived and we climbed inside while he hooked the beetle up. He chuckled a bit when we told him at which gas station we’d filled up with diesel. He assured us that he gets at least a couple of cars a month with the same problem.

I in turn assured my wife that it would be no problem as in the morning to simply get a hose and siphon out the diesel and refill the bug with gas. While we were driving to the motel I decided to make conversation and mentioned that it was a master stroke to put Sarah Palin on the ticket with John McCain. Well did I hit a right chord with the tow truck driver? He launched off into agreement after agreement with me that Sarah was the best thing since sliced bread and maybe even since bread itself.

He and I were getting on so well that I hoped my wife who is the opposition in our house would stay out of this discussion because we needed a nice tow truck driver right now. He was a very friendly guy and chatted with us as he drove us to a motel that was next door to a good garage that he again assured us would drain our car tomorrow morning.

I was thinking that the garage would open at 6am and we could get the car siphoned out and ready by 7 and we’d be off by 8am. No such luck, we were waiting when the garage opened at 7.30 am and we told the guy what was wrong with the car and would he just siphon it out and we’d be on out way. He shook his head and said “Well sir we don’t siphon anything these days we have other better methods of doing the job.”

He said at first, then he added, “That’s provided the fuel lines are not damaged and the diesel will still be in the carburetor and we gotta get that out.” Then he said he couldn’t start on it till 9am. Meanwhile I was having all these dollar signs flying past me out the window so I said, “Look mate,” I used the Aussie term to show how serious I was, “it’s just diesel, and if you give me a hose and container I’ll just do it myself,” I did the sucking and spitting gesture, “and then I’ll start it up and burn the last carby full, and put petrol in it, no big deal.” But he looked at me like I was a crazy man.

“You cain’t just siphon it out, cuz diesel breaks down the asphalt.” He said.

“No, I won’t pour it on the asphalt mate, look just give me an old drum, there’s only 10 gallons or so.”

“Ain’t got no drum sir.” He said.

“Ok, I’ll buy a container, have you got a hose lying around?”

“Ah don’t think so, Ah’ll look but I ain’t seen none around.” So the long and the short of it was that he came back without a hose as I had expected, and Kaz, feeling embarrassed dragged me out of the garage while apologizing profusely for my behavior. We retreated back to the motel room where we watched a rerun of Spartacus until about 9.15 am when I thought I heard the sputtering of a VW engine.

The diesel had been drained as he started at 8am so I put a couple of gallons of gas into the car and we fired it up. It spewed thick grey smoke for about 3 minutes, during which time I was starting to panic, and I asked the mechanic. “You did drain the diesel out yeah?” then I said to just rev it up a bit more and see if the smoke cleared. The last thing I needed now was an oil leak into the cylinders. Suddenly the smoke coming out the exhausts started to clear a bit, and I triumphantly yelled, “Yes! It’s clearing, we’re burning gas now.”

I went in to settle the account and that little diesel incident cost us $124 to fix, from 2 hours labor. That’s not to mention the $34 of wasted diesel which was going to be burnt in a furnace as waste, plus the $40 of new gas needed to continue the journey to MD.

We stared at the gas pump for a minute or so until we felt certain that it was not a diesel pump and we filled the car before setting off North bound again to I-95 and Virginia for the next 4 hours, then Maryland. We resolved to think of this incident in the future and laugh, perpetually referring to it as the Rocky Horror Diesel Show.