I had had my Ghia for about a week. Our friend Mark had just flown in from England and Peggy wanted to show him NASA. Naturally, I wanted to show him my new car, but we weren't sure if the NASA guards would let us in in my car. So we "California car-pooled" to outside the gate, I parked and we all went in in Peggy's Jeepy. On the way back, I was leading, and felt a strange loss of power. Running out of gas never even occurred to me, since the gague was still way above the red. I pulled over, turned on my hazards and turned off the lights, and the gas gague immediately fell to 0. ARGH!

Luckily, Peggy had stopped just behind us. While we were futzing around, the friendly Mountain View police came by and asked if anything was wrong. I said everything was more or less under control, and they drove off. We had a gas can in the Jeep, so we drove off in search of an open gas station. I bought a gallon of gas, poured it in the tank, and still couldn't make the car start. We realized that the gas line was full of air and the weight of the gas was not sufficient to force the gas back to the engine.

There was a closed Exxon a couple of blocks away (and mostly on a slight downgrade). Mark, who had just finished a 10 hour flight from England, and I started pushing the car down the road while Peggy drove behind with her blinkers on. (Unfortunately, the Jeepy has the damn American turn signal problem of "brakes != hazards" but at least there were a few tons of metal behind us.) We made it to the intersection and were about to run through the red arrow (at least there wasn't any traffic) and the arrow turned green! We took it as a sign and pushed extra hard and made it to the gas station parking lot, put the car in a space and jumped in the Jeepy and went home.

The next morning I went to the Exxon to pick up my car. The employees just watched me push it to the gas pumps, no offer of help. Then when I filled the tank up and tried to crank it, I discovered that I had run the battery down the previous night attempting to get it started again. So I went inside and asked for a jump. The guy was kind enough to give me a free jump, but was not very friendly about it. Finally, the car was running, he took his booster pack and slammed the engine compartment cover, and it came right back up. He slammed it another couple of times and then came around and asked if it was supposed to close. I said "yeah" and he said "well it isn't" and went back inside. I followed him in and asked if he had any twine or anything that I could tie it down with until I got home and he freaked on me, saying "First of all, you're going to have to get that car out from the island because it's in the way of customers, and second of all, you're just going to have to take it to a body shop to get them to fix the latch." I closed the hood and just hoped that it would stay down on the way home, and when I got home I disassembled the latch (thank God for the simple construction, I could actually figure out what it was supposed to do), moved it back into place and put it back on and it worked like a dream. I don't know how the mechanic broke it, but I'm obviously not going back to that Exxon!...