Series of Unfortunate Events

Labor Day this year was spent, like last year, at the Sand Dunes. I will briefly remind you that last year on Labor Day every single person in our group wrecked. Neil's wreck was the worst of all and put him out for a few weeks with a stiff and sore back. The Labor Day Dunes trip of 2008 was among our top 3 worst trips. Today we have a new winner; the #1 worst dunes trip ever (at least for our group, others have still had it much much worse).

We (Us, Neil's brother Brian and his family, Kelli, and Neil's cousin Ben and Emily) went up Monday morning and stayed through Tuesday afternoon. We like it because the majority of people go Friday, Saturday, Sunday and leave Monday so by late afternoon we mostly have the place to ourselves. The morning began with a series of minor annoyances; Kelli missed her alarm, Ben got a flat tire before we even left, while at the gas station noticed we forgot the spare gas cans and had to go back for them and so on.

We were excited for this trip because Neil had spent a good part of last week fixing up our sandrail because it broke last time we took it out, and of course it broke this time too. It ran great for about 30 minutes. Initially the battery just died so we had to push and pull start it. It was quit difficult because the sand was so dry and soft that the quads had a hard time moving the rail.
Finally we got it going again but not for long because the transmission started grinding gears and completely bound up. So much for all Neil's hard work to get it going again. It's dead now and will not be revived again for a long time. :(

It took Neil, Brian, Ben and a friendly stranger almost 2 hours to get the sandrail back to camp using 3 quads to tow it. Also, both Neil and Brian's quads had dead batteries so they had to be pull started every time. Very annoying. So Neil was using my quad and Brian was using Kelli's to tow back the rail. Because of the setup most of the tension was on my quad and whenever there was slack in the rope that would give it would jolt Neil really hard. Needless to say he was racked in the groin very hard. The grab-bar on my fourwheeler broke as a result of all the tension on it.
It's supposed to look like this....The fourwheeler is still fully functional; it just looks like it has a buck tooth now. Meanwhile the women sit back at camp. Kelli and I thought that with the men gone working with the sandrail that it would be nice if we went out and got the firewood. We purposefully did not bring our own firewood because everybody leaves and they leave behind their firewood. We loaded the back of the truck with a huge pile of really nice firewood and left it there for the boys to unload later while we went to sit in the trailer, out of the windstorm, with the rest of the gals. About an hour and a half later we hear a knock on the door. Two teenagers - "Um, you guys know your truck is on fire, right?" As we frantically jump out of the trailer we see the bed of the truck ablaze in flame. Kelli grabs our water jug, I grab Tina's water jug and both are thrown on the blaze. Then I notice something else in the back of the truck, "Gas cans!" Yep, two very full gas cans sitting right next to the fire! Luckily, as we were taking those out a friendly stranger ran up with a fire extinguisher. Suddenly there were a half dozen guys in and around the truck helping us yank out the burning wood and another man with a fire extinguisher.

Kelli burned her hand through gloves and has blisters; although her hand is much better now thanks to our awesome first aid kit. Besides that everyone is ok. We are grateful for those people who jumped right in and helped out especially those with fire extinguishers. We've joked alot about our informant..... knock knock, "Um, you guys know your truck is on fire, right?" Pounding on the door and yelling FIRE would seem like a more appropriate response, however we are so grateful that he came to get us!

Now I must say that none of the wood we picked up was black or charred in any way. All that we can conclude is that there may have been a piece of wood that was hot or warm and there was plenty of wind to fuel it... But, every piece of wood was picked up by hand so obviously not too hot.

Our spirits were all pretty low after all that. But, my wonderful husband just said, "stuff is stuff". So we decided to have some lunch and we were having grilled cheese sandwiches.

Somehow the cooker jumped off the table and onto the ground. Luckily, not broken but still very annoying after our day of misfortune. Thanks to Ben and Emily for sharing their Peanut Butter and Jelly with us :)

Consequently we stayed at camp the rest of the day because we didn't want anything else to go wrong. The wind never did die down so some of the wood stayed on fire most of the day despite how much water was dumped on it - weird. Later that night we did have a big fire going. What you see in the pic isn't even half of the wood we picked up. We had "had a bad experience" so we wanted to keep it smaller than what we initially intended but I have to put a picture of it if for nothing else than to feel better about it all.
Despite the events of Monday we had a very nice day on Tuesday without any mishaps. I may get around to posting some more fun pics. We are grateful that everyone is ok because we know it all could have been a lot worse.