A Beautiful Ride.....

It started out as a beautiful mountain family road trip.  We needed to go back to St. Johns to do some due diligence, this time with the fellas - so that they could take it all in.  We looked at a couple of houses and ate at the Mexican restaurant.  Tanner and Taylor had burgers (which they said were delightful!) 
 Then we hit the road.  You see, our day had a couple of different agendas - St. Johns during the day and Apache Junction by 6:15 for Tanner's football game.  It was about 3-4 hours away.  But we were well on our way from Show Low to Globe, our GPS estimating our arrival time in Apache Junction at 6:08.  Now keep in mind, we have never been this way before.  All other routes to St. Johns / Show Low have an abundance of little towns every few miles.  So, when the gas gage read 41 miles, we didn't really think anything of it.  Then we hit the mountains, and it dropped to 21 miles - while the GPS showed 40 miles to Globe.  Surely there would be a town or station between here and there.  

Notice nothing in the rear view mirror....  That's very accurate!

By 35 miles out, we were showing 0 miles of gas.  Yet ironically (more accurately, prayerfully) we made it another 20 miles.  Timm did a lot of coasting in neutral... it was a good thing he was driving.  But then came the sputtering and the engine died.  We were about 15 miles short of a gas station.
So we pulled a Dave (sorry dad, but you earned that honor through years and years of non-gassing efforts) and we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.  With no cell service, Timm and Tay started walking. The rest of us waited at the car for 3 hours.  We got bored.

 Only one person stopped to see if we needed help. The wife of a cop who had just flown past us without stopping. She let us use her phone to try Timm - but he still didn't have a signal.

We were bored but fine until it started to get dark.  Then someone had a freak out - which annoyed someone else.  And no, neither of those people were me.  My freak outs were confined to my head...Some may have been a little irrational, but your mind starts to wander.  Luckily we said some more prayers and watched Star Wars Clone Wars on Tanner's ipod and we were fine.
Finally we saw a tow truck coming towards us.  They flipped on their lights and slowed down.  We all high fived.  And then they went passed us.  We were like, "no they are going to turn around.  they just need a spot"  But they went a LONG way.  Finally they did turn around.  Tay n Timm stepped out of the tow truck. We gave them big hugs and held back our tears.  The nice tow man emptied the gas can into our tank and $118 later we pulled safely in to a gas station. 
Tann missed his game (which ended up being a blessing...Some of his teammates were very injured due to some dirty play by the opponent).
Nice lesson in patience, preparedness and prayers!