Las Vegas to Seattle and Back in Three Days (Part 2)

Saint Jeremy, Son of Clark, and no doubt every self help guru to ever exist, have said that if you believe something is going to happen, it will. Unfortunately, I only had half a tank of gas left as I approached a small settlement of Ely, NV.

I know what you're thinking: half a tank of gas should be plenty, and you're right, but then you'd be breaking the second commandment of solo grand touring. To avoid running out of gas, a most embarrassing shame, thou shall have no less than half a tank of gas at any time.

By this time, it was already nice and dark outside at 21:00, and being a city boy from Vegas who expects just about everything to be open at my convenience, I was a bit shocked to see the gas station was closed. This was even worse than being stranded--sleeping in a middle of nowhere hick town where I definitely know there are people, and quite possibly, a roving gang of psychopaths just waiting to smash into my car, kidnap me and have me star in a terrible Saw spin-off.

I waited a bit, ran the options in my mind--all of them bad.

Do I turn back, or do I sit it out and wait, or do I keep pushing forward to Ely and hope I don't actually run out of gas on the way. I know it sounds ridiculous just reading it now, but when you've only got a cached map on your HTC HD2 smart phone--which, by the way, left to its own devices will only last four hours on a full charge--you're pretty much blind as to how much longer the gas will last. I toggled through the driver information screen on the car, and this is where I finally stopped hating the rental car.

The fuel range showed I had 200 miles to go.

I was astonished by how remarkably efficient an powerful this engine is, compared to mine which will leave me for dead at 275 miles on a full tank--310 if I drive it slowly--which, I believe, is genuinely more dangerous. See, if I drive too slowly then my mind isn't occupied by the slow driving and occupies itself with something else--perhaps at the exact moment the driver cabin occupies itself with a storm of broken glass and twisted steel as I smash into oncoming traffic.

I decided to wait a bit, and if no one turned up, I'd limp the car all the way to the next population center. I had confidence it'd make it if I drove it slow enough, but really didn't want to risk it. As luck would have it, the proprietor of the gas station lived across the street and saw me waiting there. The old lady was extremely friendly, and we passed the usual pleasantries before I got to business and restocked on snacks and fuel. On the way out, I asked how far I had left to go to Ely.

She told me Ely was about 150 miles away.

I smiled and thanked her, while a cold lump settled in my stomach.

It took little more than an hour to get to Ely. I don't know why, but I expected a bit more from it than what I saw: a couple of gas stations, a Comfort Inn, and a McDonald's and a Taco Bell here and there. it sort of reminded me of Beatty, NV--nothing really there, no particular reason to stop except to resupply. They had a Bank of America branch there, so perhaps I missed the greater share of its scale because of the night. Shaken from my experience an hour before, I decided more gas to the corner of US-6 and US-93 and then continued my way towardsa the state line.

As soon as I broke left at US-93/US-93 Alternate junction, I decided to see what this plucky little car--missing two cylinders from birth--could do. It wasn't a particularly savage car, and the interior was remarkably quiet and overall a nice place to be. The engine more or less asserted the vehicle forward at a steady pace. It felt more like a distance runner than a sprinter and it did it in style and comfort. I'd soon learn that this is just the beginning of what this car can really do.

The way the rental behaved is in contrast against my 2007 Mustang GT, which has an acceleration that has a deep V8 growl as it urges you forward at a determined sprint up to 80, and then if you're still asking for more, it shoves the vehicle all the way to a hundred. If you're a certified lunatic who doesn't know when to stop--it then brutally hammers you well into the centennial club just as the tuned exhaust starts to sing a damn near hypnotic drone into the cabin, until you're past 120 and--horrifyingly--it still has more to give. Past this point, and to a lesser skilled driver like myself, it's just no longer cool and starts to get genuinely scary.

Feeling not quite brave enough to max it just yet, I put the rental through its paces for a good twenty minutes before my own biologicals started to interfere. I pulled over the shoulder to take a piss, and as I walked back to the car I looked up for a moment--and was stunned into awe.

It was by far one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen so far. The moon shone with a cold gleam, and slashed across the night sky was the band of stars that marked the edge of our galaxy. To this day I believe that moment added an hour to my natural life span.

With my spirit renewed, I powered to toward the state line, stopping for more gas at a Love's Gas Station just outside of Wells, NV, where I had to buy a new charger for my phone, grab a coffee, and scrape off an entire generation of insects that met their doom on the bumper and windshield of the rental.

As I reached Jackpot, NV, I'd been driving for almost ten hours after the daily eight hour grind ant work, and I was starting to reach my limit. I slowed down to normal driving speeds, which turned out to be a horrible mistake as the sleep spell crashed down upon me almost all at once. I extended a pity of a glance at the settlement if I'm honest. To my mind it was yet another casino city knock off and a far cry from the real Vegas, and it probably was.

I neared the street where I'd booked my hotel at roughly 0300, but even at this hour and this tired I still remembered I was far from home, and that saving money wherever possible was still a top priority. Besides, what's the point in sleeping in a fancy hotel room when you've gotta be on the road at 10 the next day?

With that in mind, I saw a Motel 6 or something like that across the road and thought I'd try my luck there. I saved about twenty bucks, but it cost me about twenty minutes of sleep while the neighbors upstairs got it on. I tried the local channels on TV--a grand touring tradition of mine--before I got bored and defaulted to Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. At this point I didn't even have the energy to shower, so I settled into bed and congratulated myself for ditching cable TV as I saw Adult Swim no longer had anything worth watching, and in fact had people on CARTOON NETWORK.

Then, sleep overcame me.