Monday, June 23, 2008

 

My brother in law and I got up early and made arrangements through a friend of our host family to get our vehicles checked out.  While we waited to get them in, we fixed a big breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and sausage.  We had bought the sausage w/out reading the fine print – it was sweet Italian sausage – very lean, but it would have tasted much better on a pizza than for breakfast.  O well…

 

Both vehicles are Chevy’s, and both had their “check engine soon” lights come on.  The guy who ran the diagnostics on the vehicles was a minister whose shop was right at the church he ministered at!  His name was Jayme, and he had a gun strapped to his hip…a pistol packing preacher/mechanic.  He was able to get both vehicles up and running (catalytic converters – probably bad gas in Canada).

 

In the afternoon, the kids took a break from 4-wheeling and we headed to the Iditarod headquarters a few miles away; the official starting point for the Iditarod, a dogsled race that runs in March every year and covers well over 2,000 miles from Wasilla to Nome.  The history behind the race is back in the 1920’s Nome was on the verge of being wiped out by diphtheria, and the village was so isolated the only way to get serum to them was by dogsled.  The movie “Balto” is about this as well. 

 

They had a good video, and some dogs were outside that would pull you around for $10.  They looked pretty skinny, not much like the dogs in the video. 

 

We grabbed some Papa Murphy’s pizza and stopped by a store to get a few 2-liter bottles of pop.  The pop was on sale for $2.00/bottle for all Pepsi, Coke and RC products so we had the Big K brand for $1.39/bottle.  We had a fun evening playing Guesstures (boys won) before hitting the bed around 12:30.