On Sat, 22 Jul 2017 23:09:37 -0500, Paul in Houston TX wrote:

[...] the key but it is in a safe place.

After my Dad first locked himself out of his '69 Pontiac, he always put a
spare set in the air breather outside of the air filter. (In those days,
one did not need to release the hood from inside the car.)

Things went okay until my brother locked himself out of the car one day,
and used the spare set, but by mistake put it back in the air breather
inside of the air filter.

A few weeks later, my Dad was driving the whole family on a sinuous gravel
road, and an impatient lead-foot in a pickup truck was tailing us way too
close because we were going too slow for him I guess. When we got to the
next fairly long strait stretch, my Dad slowed down and pulled to the right
to let him go by. But instead of just pulling to the left and advancing
ahead of us in a reasonable manner, the pickup gunned it, presumably to
make us eat more of his dust than necessary and shower our windshield with
a few pounds of road gravel.

I'm not sure of the exact displacement of our Pontiac, (389""" IIRC), but
it did have a 4-barrel V-8. And there was still enough room on the
straitaway for my Dad to go by the pickup truck and shower him with a few
pounds of road gravel.

However, flooring the gas pedal had the effect of causing the spare keys to
fall into the open throttle, effectively blocking it wide open. My Dad had
the time to *try* to lift up the linkage rod under the pedal (to no avail),
but with the straightaway coming to an end had to start controlling the
engine power by turning the ignition off and on repeatedly. Of course, he
could have simply turned it off completely, but he did not want to 'lose
face' with the stranger driving the pickup truck.

Every time he turned the ignition 'on', there was a huge flaming explosion
as the unburned fuel-air mix was ignited, until we were far enough ahead of
the pickup and luckily had reached the place where the new road made a
sharp turn, but the old road leading nowhere was still passable.

In case little kids might be reading this, I won't repeat here what was
said to my brother when my Dad found the cause of the carburator
malfunction.