Y'all aināt gonna believe this shit. LOL. So I head out of Eads, CO west on some lone highway, then south, then west, and at some point I get onto the 160. My mileage gauge said Iād already done just under 50 miles, and my gut immediately said FIND GAS.
I did not. I reasoned like this: My 3.5 gallon tank normally safely gets me about 120 miles or so. *Then thereās the reserve tank. *And then there are the two gas cans Iāve had along for the whole ride and havenāt had to use. Note the asterisks.
Google Maps said it was 148 miles to the next junction. I assumed Iād get to about 100 miles on my mileage gauge and surely find a place to fuel up.
Sunny day. Very pretty. The landscape went on and on forever. I rode and rode. No cars. Cows. Horses. Tractors. Ranches waaaaay off in the distance. A sign welcomed me to Pueblo County. I started seeing signs for wildlife reserves. I kept riding. At mile marker 42, my mileage gauge said an even 100miles. This means that if I donāt find a gas station, I have to get to that junction on the gas I have. I start to panic. I tell myself to stay cool. That this is a man-up moment. So I slow my speed to 50mph to save gas.
I look around, and it has changed from cornfield and grass to brushy desert with mountains in the distance. Then I see a freaking antelope. I wouldāve taken a picture, because it looked so crazy andā¦. African, maybe? Black, white, and tanā¦. very haunchyā¦. like a cross between a deer and a zebra. Iām thinking okay seriously, where the fuck am I?
Then it happened, right around mileage 129ā¦. it started sputtering and lurching. Again, the cars are few and far between. Trucks, rather. This isnāt car country.
I got off the bike and said okay, well time to flip the switch on the petcock and get into the reserve tank. That should get me another 5 miles or so, then Iāll finish strong with the gas cans if I need to. Now for a lesson in gas tanks and petcocksā¦..
A petcock is a lever (see the photo) which controls gas flow from the tank into the carburetors. There is no āreserve tankā. The tank has two lines, the lower of the two is used to drain out the bottom quarter of the tankā¦. this is your reserve. Now hereās the āfunnyā part. On my previous bike, the lever UP was the main line, and the lever DOWN was the reserve. Pretty intuitive. On this bike, however, it is reversedā¦. which means that 128 miles is all the gas mileage I get out of a tank. With the petcock in the UP position, I was already using my reserve. Okay. Sucky. But I still have the two gas cans.
Remember the asterisks? Before I left I did the math, and decided it was probably a good idea to get two more cansā¦. for a total of four. And there I was at REI, looking dead at then, but chose to save money and storage space. Dumb.
I put the two cans of gas in, and with some reluctance she started up. I had exactly 15 miles to go, and got almost there. Almost. With only 1.4 miles left, she died. No more gas. Now I worried. Progressive Roadside Assistance has its limitations, and this is definitely where that line is drawn.
The whole time I had been coasting along at 50mph, a white pickup was behind me, and I couldnāt help but wonder why he didnāt pass, even though I signaled him to. When she died, he pulled over. I walked to his truck.
Mexican guy from Albuquerque, Harley riderā¦. said he got a hunch I might be in trouble when he saw me slow down after having passed him at a reasonable clip awhile back. Manuel. My freaking hero. He asked if I had gas cans. I said yeah, so he drove me to the station in Walensburg, CO.
As we sat in his car, I told him about my coast to coast adventure. I told him about my blog, and said he would DEFINITELY be featured in it. I gave him my card. He looked at it like it was wrong in some way.
āYour last name is PROCOPIO?ā, he asked. āYes, Dennis Procopio. Iām Italianā¦. itās an Italian name, originally from the Greek āProcopiusā. It roughly translates to good or able manā.
āMy last name is also PROCOPIOā, he said. āIāve never met another Procopio. Usually when I tell people my name they look at me strange, like what kind of name is that. I have asked my family, since itās not a Mexican name, and they just said it was probably Spanish.ā
You just canāt make this stuff up. Manuel and Dennis Procopio. Seriously man, what are the odds?
I am now in the mountains, at elevation 7000āā¦. staying in a lodge in Fort Garland. I can literally hear elk bugling as I type this. Apparently the deer and elk are all over the place at night, and the locals said it would have been a really bad idea to ride my bike at night through the valley.
Dude. Wow. Okayā¦.. LOLā¦. itās real. Tomorrow the Grand Canyon. Stay tuned.