Tahoe
Five days in Tahoe through New Year's Eve 2006...
With Frances, Delia, Patrick, and about a zillion of their friends. Plus me.
On the truly bizarre side, we actually had quite a few skiers in this group. I don't know how that happened. Delia and Kelly defected to snowboards on the third day, and have sore wrists and bruised butts to show the "wisdom" of their change.
Day one was stopping by REI to have them lighten my wallet by several hundred dollars in exchange for a pair of lovely Salomon Scream 8's with S810 bindings-- very nice! Then hauling butt up to Tahoe in very clear, dry weather, which made for a pretty fast 4 hour drive from the Bay Area, compared to the 6+ hours it takes when 50 or 80 is snowed in and frozen over.
Day two is the first of three days spent at Kirkwood, marked by a fiasco trying to get the student tickets (we failed), then all day on the greens and blues at Red Cliffs and Mountain Village at Kirkwood. Thanks to the rain and snow that made skiing over Christmas so miserable, the snow is very nice given the miserable conditions this season. Dinner is... confusing. I'm personally used to either staying at a hotel and eating out the whole time, or staying at a cabin and cooking every meal after supplying the cabin with a massive Costco run. This trip seems to be... organized chaos.
Fortunately that involved a dozen grocery trips, one of the first involved frozen pizzas and salad for dinner the secondy day, so we didn't starve. Woohoo! Then the rest of the crowd shows up...
An aborted attempt to install a roof rack on my car last night is saved by additional parts picked up with a last-second REI run with Frances/Patrick/Kaj/etc., so we install that the morning of day three, then load the four skiers into the car (!) and pile off to Kirkwood for a full day of skiing. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! Plus some, uh, interesting pictures by a professional photographer atop Chair 2 at Kirkwood.
Food that night is jambalaya by Frances-- very tasty, although slightly spicy.
Day four is now the third day at Kirkwood. Delia and Kelly have swapped out skis for snowboards the night before, and, umm, yeah. The pictures speak for themselves. Delia's saurkraut craving is finally filled at Timber Canyon Lodge at Kirkwood.
Evidently more pasta for dinner was involved, then a few people went off to the casinos near the State Line for New Year's Eve, but I was passed out and missed all that.
We did have difficulty opening bottles of champange, but that was finally done, then the beer and vodka were mixed with Catchphrase to provide fun til 6am in the morning. With bonus nightmares of the beep... beep... beep... BEEP... BEEP... BEEPBEEPBPEEBEEP!!! for everyone involved.
Day five-- Frances, Patrick, and Kathy left. Somehow Kaj got up after three hours of sleep to make it to Heavenly (he was the only one to survive that morning), while the rest of us lounged around, ordered pizza, and watched USC vs. Michigan. Dinner was at Orchid Thai, down the street-- quite tasty, although finding Thai food all over Tahoe was a bit odd. Finishing the night with bowling and then more Catchphrase was odd, too! (what happened to gambling and buffets?) Then I remembered this is all organized chaos anyway, kept drinking, and it was all good.
We left the next morning after feeding the ducks and eating pancakes, then had our 6th consecutive day of beautiful weather and headed back to Los Angeles. Remind me the next time to remove the ski rack from the car, though, as the fuel economy hit speeding after Delia/Kaj/Kelly in their rental Chevy HHR from Sacramento was murderous...
