from no gas to no gas

So our good friend Andrew was in town this weekend.  He was in Miami for a meeting and was able to schedule a 3 day trip down to visit us!  We had a blast running around seeing the villages, getting to the beach, meeting people, whooping up on him in Sequence, and just enjoying being together.  Thanks for coming bud!  It was a great trip.  It also ended in hilarious, Dominican quirk, fashion.

Our car runs on propane.  It has a switch to be able to run it on gasoline too but it has previously had problems on gas.  Our friends joke that it dances the Bachata (a traditional Dominican style of dancing) because it just surges and abates and surges and abates before finally dying.  It is kind of frustratingly hilarious.  Well anyway, our mechanic told us he fixed it so this shouldn't be relevant, but it is.

So last Thursday the propane stations in town stopped selling propane.  They said they didn't have any and that the trucks to refill the stations hadn't arrived from Santo Domingo (or wherever).  Strange since Kelly and I watched the propane tanker pull in one night.  But corruption is as corruption does.  So, Sunday, having still been unable to fill up our tank, we pumped in gasoline and took off early in the morning to drive Andrew back to the airport for his 1:10pm flight.  However, about 15 minutes out of town, we started doing the Bachata, but just briefly and then it stopped.  A bit concerned but confident in our mechanic we thought we'd push on until seconds after the decision we saw a propane tanker heading into town and thought PERFECT! We'll run back, fill up our propane and be on our way, worry free.  However, when we got to the station, about 5 minutes after the tanker, they let us know that there was still no gas.  The tanker truck was apparently invisible to them because when we pointed it out, they said, no, there's no gas.  Strange.

So we rolled back out of town on gasoline and got about twice as far before the Bachata started again.  This time a bit more persistently.  Troubled we decided to give up on the car, drive back into town, catch the 9:15am bus to Santo Domingo and hopefully arrive about 1/2 hour before his flight.  It was going to be close.  So, painfully inconsistently we danced our way back into town, rushed out of the house to the bus station, purchased our tickets at 9:10am, looked at the time stamp and found out - whoops!  The bus doesn't leave at 9:15, it leaves at 9:45.  Having now resigned ourselves to the terrible fact that we couldn't get to the airport on time, our jetsetter friend called the airlines and using his platinum status was able to switch to a flight leaving at 3:30.  We're back in the game!  So we hung around, caught the bus and got out of town.

On the way we called our taxi friend who always drives us but weren't able to get through.  "Of course" was what we were thinking at this point.  So we made a few calls to other friends and got connected to a "reliable" taxi driver who indeed, was on time to pick us up.  Well, in the 25 minutes from the bus station to the airport, the weather became downright nasty - to the point where it was raining so hard that I was having trouble seeing anything out the windshield other than the giant tree tops (no joke) that were blowing across the road.  And, just when it became the worst, our driver started muttering to himself, and then very nearly crying, about some "BIG problem" he was having.  Afraid to ask, I tried to wait him out.  Turns out, we ran out of gas.  For the reccord, that's more or less twice in one day that we ran out of gas.  But, with amazing heroisism, our driver plunged out of the car, clutching his 1 gallon gas tank, into the driving wind and rain, bolted across 3 lanes of oncoming traffic, across the highway divider, accross 3 more lanes of traffic and tried to hitchhike back to the gas station.  When nobody picked him up, he came back across all 6 lanes, and was able to catch a ride the other direction, get gas, come back, and finally, and safely, get us to the airport where Andrew was able to catch his plane out of the craziness.

Unfortunately for us, the day wasn't over.  We arrived safely back to the bus station but the weather just kept getting worse.  As we got on our bus we had high hopes that it would be able to plow through and get us home.  But, a little over an hour outside of Santo Domingo, we came to a bridge that had been damaged by the rising river and could not pass.  So, we turned around, and headed back to Santo Domingo where we thankfully were able to get a spot in a hostel we like to stay at until Monday late afternoon when we were finally able to get a ride all the way back to Barahona.

Twice out of gas, 3 times turning around, 2 flights, 4 taxis, 3 busses and 1 night in a hostel.  That's what it took to get 1 dear friend to the airport and us back home.  Sound enticing?  Come visit!

Laughing at it all,
M&K