We drove from Genoa to Zurich on our last day before flying out of Zurich in the morning. There is a tunnel through St Gotthard pass that is the only link through the area. The pass itself was closed because of the snow the night before so we had to take the tunnel. There was an accident in the tunnel and traffic was dead-stopped for 30 minutes, then we moved forward about 1 km and then we dead-stopped for another 2-hours.
Snow. We got out of the Alps just in time.
Dead stopped on the highway
After that, we inched along in 1st gear for about an hour watching the gas gauge drop towards empty and then the gas light came on. We were not near the tunnel yet, and we really did not want to run out of gas in the tunnel. Fortunately, there were signs for a rest area with gas that we could see off in the distance. As we approached, we saw that the gas icon had a big red X through it. No gas. We had to stop there anyway because at the inch-an-hour rate, we would run out of gas no matter what. We thought that we could wait out the traffic and then try go coast through the tunnel on what remaining gas we had. At the rest stop, we learned that they keep an emergency ration of gas so we paid the $50 CHF for 20 liters of gas, had dinner, and finally arrived in Zurich just past midnight. The hotel bar was still open and, out of sympathy, the check-in clerk gave us two drink tickets ;)
