Tony Pierce of LAist, a Web site about Los Angeles, embarked on a Route 66 road trip from his home base.
It sounds like he got ripped off by his auto mechanic, though. After an oil change and other small repairs that totaled $250 before his trip started, the oil light came on somewhere in the Arizona desert in the middle of the night. Then the gas light came on.
But Tony was rescued by Fred, a teenager at a Mobil station.
Bro crawled under the car, let the plug out to show us that there was maybe a quarter cup of oil in the car, tightened it up real good and poured in three quarts of the good stuff.
Route 66 somehow had let us drive miles and miles and miles in the pitch black Arizona desert with no gas and no oil.
The magic had already begun and we had barely broken into the Tootsie Rolls.
And if things couldn’t get weirder, St. Fred refused a tip, a beer, a candy bar, or anything. But he did give us his MySpace address so that we could be “friends.” At that point we realized we just may have hallucinated the whole thing. Or we were in store for a wild road trip which had started off with a (near) bang.
I don’t think he hallucinated it, though. Tony videotaped part of his conversation with Fred.
Believe it or not, I hear stories like that on the Mother Road all the time.
UPDATE: I’ve fixed it so comments are allowed in the system now. WordPress was doing some system upgrades when I was writing the post, and some funky things were happening at the time.