Road Stories is a new WWE.com weekly feature that will appear on the first Wednesday of every month. It will document candid stories from WWE Superstars involving their life on the road. The first story, Car Trouble on the Road, was submitted by Matt Hardy.

We recently had a loop where we started in Portland, Maine and from Portland we were going to Burlington, Vt. to Ogdensburg, N.Y. and down to Albany on the final day. So, there were long drives in between. I, with two other WWE Superstars, get a rental car in Portland, and we start diving along heading to Burlington. We drive a portion of the way—maybe an hour or an hour-and-a-half—and we have to be in Burlington an hour before the show, when all of a sudden the car stops. We have no idea why, and we’re in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. We get out and check a couple of simple things. “Well, is the battery good? Are the tires flat? It has gas in it, so what’s wrong with this car?”

We don’t know. So we call AAA and AAA says, “We don’t really know where you are, where are you?”

So here we are, three WWE Superstars stranded in the mountains of Vermont, and at this point, we were definitely going to be late for the show. So, we flag somebody down, get the mile marker of where we are because we had no idea, and tell AAA. When AAA shows up about 45 minutes later the guy goes through every test that you can go through on the car and says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Try and turn it over again.”

And we’re trying to turn it over and he says, “It just sounds like it’s out of gas.”

I say, “Well there’s no way it’s out of gas, I have a tank in it.”

He says, “Hold on a second.” He goes back and gets a gas can and pours some in the gas tank and says, “Crank it again.”

We crank it and it actually cranks. I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
 
He says, “Could be that your gas meter is wrong; you have a problem with your fuel injection; or the gas isn’t coming all the way out of the tank. I advise getting rid of this car, or if not, make sure it stays on full.”

So we go to the gas station and fill it up. We make it to the show just in time to have our matches, and we’re going to take the rental car back to the rental car company because obviously there’s a problem with it. But, in Burlington, Vt. all of the rental car companies were closed by the time the show was over, and we had to go because we had an early show the next day. So, we started driving and every fifty miles we stopped and refilled—every fifty miles. And we were horrified the whole while because these were 300 mile drives and there’s nothing out there. We just figured the next day we’ll get it [a different car] when we get to Ogdensburg.

When we get to Ogdensburg, the rental company we got the car from didn’t have an office there because it’s such a small town. So every 50 miles, for 800 miles, we had to stop and fill up on gas. And we were all sweating, sitting in the car thinking, “Well, how long has it been—40, 50 miles? Okay, let’s stop and get gas.”

On a 300-mile trip we had to stop six or seven times for gas. It was amazing. It was the most brutal rental car experience ever, all of us fearing that we were going to continue to run out of gas and be stuck on the side of the road and miss the show.

For more Road Stories, pick up a copy of Are We There Yet?