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Two weeks ago I left St. Louis in the midst of final exams to travel to Minnesota for a friend's wedding. The intent was to make a quick drive up there, go to the wedding, get hammered at the reception, and head back here for my final on Monday. Of course, it didn't turn out to be that simple. Because I didn't want to make the drive alone, the first leg of my trip north took my to the southwest; in Evansville I met up with my friends from high school and set out in a rented van for Minnesota.

At this point I need to reveal the stupidity of our plans. You see, the trip from Evansville, IN to Buffalo, MN was estimated at 12 to 13 hours. So our departure time was calculated by finding out when we needed to arrive in MN (5pm on Friday) and subtracting the necessary time for the trip and a few stops. This had us leaving around midnight. The more I thought about this plan, the worse it seemed. Fortunately, the others came to the same decision and the departure time was moved to 7pm by mutual agreement. This still left us driving through most of the night, but it did mean we wouldn't be doing the entire trip when we were very tired.

Anyway, we were on the highway by 7:30 on Thursday night, and the first half of the trip went pretty well. However, not long after we made it into Wisconsin (our route took us north through Illinois and then across Wisconsin to the Minneapolis area), things took a turn for the worse. Just after we entered Wisconsin we went through a construction area, which bounced our Chrysler Town & Country around quite a bit. Not long after that I noticed (I was riding shotgun at the time) that we only had half a tank of gas left. I mentioned to Jared, the driver at the time, that we were burning a lot of gas. Then I noticed that I could stare at the needle on the gas gauge and watch it drop. I woke up Luke in the seat behind us and made him confirm what I saw. Jared made a joke about the gas tank having a hole. Sadly, his joke proved to be rather ironic, as our gas was pouring out on the highway behind us. By the time we reached milemarker 155 on I-90 we were out of gas. The time was approximately 2:30 am.

John looked under the van and told us that the filler pipe that connects to the gas tank had been ripped open and the bottom of the gas tank was gauged up. We were lucky our exhaust or a random spark hadn't ignited the gas we were pouring out. We called 911 and they dispatched a wrecker. We got to ride in the van while it was on the back of a flatbed truck from where we broke down to a nearby hotel, where we spent the next few hours until Enterprise opened up. We got a new van and were back on the road by 9 am, but I still haven't seen a bill for the van we wrecked.

So the moral of this story is that Wisconsin is an evil, evil state and it should be avoided at all costs.

Posted by on 15 May 2003 at 4:40 PM