And the winners of the gas game…
When you rent a car, you have two choices: buy a tank of gas up-front at current average market prices, or pay a premium (usually almost twice average market price) for the fuel they need to refill the car with once it is returned. The “game” to play when doing this is buy the full tank of gas up-front, then see just how empty you can get the car before returning it.
I hereby declare us to be the winners of that game. We managed to run out of gas 0.2 miles from the rental agency, and had to push it in to return it completely empty of fuel.
Mind you, this is a very stupid game; if we had run out just 0.1 miles sooner, we would have been stuck on I-190 in heavy traffic. That’s 0.003 gallons of gas. 0.3% of a gallon. That’s ridiculous, and it was a not-so-gentle hint that we probably shouldn’t play stupid games with gasoline levels with two small children in the car and a plane to catch. (Even at the intersection where the car died, we shouldn’t have been stopped; there was a PA system that kept saying, “Drivers please return to your vehicle.” I ignored it, because we had to push, and I figured the worst that would happen is the state police would show up and help us push.)
(All the same — we won, we won!)
