Siblings Unite! Day 4

Me? Drive too fast on a dirt/gravel road?? Never... :) *evil grin* Ok, so maybe I drive a little too fast. I forgot to mention that on the way to Denali yesterday I accidentally left the E-brake partially engaged and we lost all of our back brakes, including the E-brake itself. The pedal now depresses all the way to the floor before the front brakes start to engage, taking about twice as long to stop. So, we're crusing down a gravel hill on the Denali highway, and just as I'm thinking "Damn, it would take a lot of effort to make this bus stop if something ran in front of us" a huge ass moose (it was seriously as tall, if not taller than the bus) ran right out in front of us. "Holy &*$#!!!!" I slammed on the brakes and to the left I could see another moose so I kept the wheels straight, hoping that the moose in front of us would run faster than I could brake and that the other moose would either hurry up and run across or stay on the side of the road. Just as I notice that we're going to total the bus unless I turn the wheel, I veered to the left and we miss the moose by about a 1/8 of an inch - Casey swears that the back hoof hit the front of the van. The moose was so terrified that it pissed its way across the van. Afterwards, Casey and I just stared at the road in front of us. "Dude" I think was about all I could get out and then we pounded fists. We survived! I vowed to take it a little easier down the downhills but that didn't stop my lead foot on the straightaways.

About a half an hour later it started to rain as we passed by a van stranded on the side of the road. A group of three wildlife photographers from Sweden had two flats on their rental, and while a motorcyclist had pulled over to help, I thought that after our moose incident that it would be good kharma to do a good deed and see if they needed any additional help. We ended up taking one of the guys and one of their flat tires with us to a lodge they had passed just up the road. We get no more than five minutes down the road when Casey pops his head out of the window, "Ahhh...we have a flat." Dude, seriously? I know Casey's sense of humor and at first I didn't believe him so I kept driving. "No really, you have a flat." Dangit! So much for good kharma. In fact, we had just the opposite. We got out the lug wrench to remove the tire. I tried first but my girly muscles weren't strong enough - the thing wouldn't budge. So then Casey tried. Nothing. We both pried on it and then...SNAP! The lug nuts were so tight that the entire wrench snapped in half. Damn kharma. So we ended up driving about 10 miles at 10mph to the lodge where (thankfully!) there was a guy repairing tires from the gravel road. Apparently it was tearing everyone's tires to shreads because there was a line of people waiting to have their tires fixed.

We enjoyed a warm lunch, paid for the tire service (they couldn't get the tire off either and had to just plug the leak), drove the rest of the Denali Highway and then made our way South to a river about an hour or so from the highway where we stopped for the night to camp. I rigged up the surround sound in the van to my laptop - we enjoyed a movie and beer (ok, more than one beer) and then hit the sack.