Funny, reminds me of the time we were futzing around on our small inland lake in a sunfish when we capsized and had nothing to bail out water. So I asked for the baseball cap on his head so I could bail out water and he said no! Fucker, I swam off, got to shore and walked home. It’s was a ridiculous situation I have no explanation for his reasoning other than he hates getting his head wet.
I had the U-joint break in my car back when I was in high school. I was about 20 miles from home and only had 23 cents on me, that meant 2 phone calls. I called home, no answer. I called my older brother, got his answering machine. One dime gone. I decided to save the last dime and try to call home whenever I passed a pay phone. This was 1974, pay phones were still just about everywhere.
I decided to head towards my grandmother’s house. I was about 10 miles from where I was. Not sure how long it took me to walk there but I made it. No one home. My aunt that lived a few blocks away was not home either. Calls home still went unanswered. Drank a bunch of water from a hose and fill my pocket with plums from a tree at my aunt’s house. Just as I turned on the street I lived on I see my family heading towards home from the opposite direction. They had gone to a park for the day, my grandmother and aunt were with them. It took me about 7½ hours to walk home.
To this day I still have an occasional nightmare about being stuck somewhere and I have a long walk ahead of me.
I thought of the OP yesterday when I jumped in the car for an errand, wearing flip flops and a tee shirt at about 40F.
Bet you had your phone ? These days it’s a do I dare leave the phone at home, 
Knock wood ain’t never been stranded like the op.
And a $10 in the glove box for emergencies would have been of no use to him with the station closed and only the pumps open. I assume those only work with cards. I actually don’t know, I live in Oregon and we don’t pump our own.
Thank god I was not still in NJ, where I just moved from, there would not have been a station two blocks away that was closed but the pumps still open, cards only of course. I used to love in NJ that there was always someone there to pump gas, I hate doing it.
And I am sorry, Bootb, there are a lot of people in the Western world so poor they can’t set aside $10 for emergency gas. More than a few hundred or a few thousand or a few million. They don’t have $10 to spare to buy desert for their families.
Came off the last PEI ferry one cold Canadian winter night and ran out of gas. After the last car sped past me, the awful silence would not be broken until morning. But – it was a VW beetle, no gauge, but a reserve tank, which I had never used. I reached for the reserve toggle, which at first felt seized, but finally turned. And – the thing worked!! I had a gallon of gas to get to safety.
In Kansas I learned to carry cans of gas de-icer. I ran out about 1/4 mile from work at 5 am, and drove to worh on four cans of Heet…