We were driving from Las Vegas to Reno. As we were going through Tonopah we planned to stop for gas, but we didn't. When we reached Coaldale Junction we saw a trailer, with a "sale" sign...so we stopped. We poked around and found an ashtray from the Coaldale Inn, which we bought (but I can't find a picture of it on the computer ). Then we got back on the road.

About 30-40 miles up the road, we started wondering if we should be concerned about the gas tank. My husband planned to drive to Reno using a route that would take us through Bishop and Lee Vining, which he thought would be a more scenic route...but probably a little longer. The alternative would have been to take 95, probably a little more direct, but less scenic. We didn't have a Garmin or cell phones back then...just a road atlas. We'd gone through a couple of "towns" that we thought might have gas stations, but they turned out to be one house or trailer surrounded by empty land. My husband said if we were driving our car he was sure we'd have plenty of gas to get us to Bishop, but since it was a rental he wasn't as confident. I said that I couldn't judge, from looking at the atlas, so I asked him to pull over so he could look at the atlas and decide whether we should keep going, or if we might need to backtrack.

He pulled into an open area by the side of the road. While we were sitting there a pickup truck, towing a horse trailer, pulled over and stopped. My husband walked over to the driver and found out that he was on his way to Las Vegas, for a horse show, and stopped to exercise his horses. My husband was asking him what route he had just traveled, and how far away was a gas station. The guy kind of laughed and said "I've run into guys like you before! Come with me." He walked over to the truck and pulled a gas can out of the back! He told my husband that he carried that gas just to help out people on the road, as his truck took diesel...and he wouldn't accept any payment for it! They poured the gas into the tank and we were on our way, enjoying the scenery and confident that we had plenty of gas to get to the next town.