Trying Tahoe

Neither here nor there.
Hunkered down on the Cal/Nev border

Now don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed Reno and the air races, and I thought Virginia City was... interesting. But Tahoe is more my kind of vacation. I'm a mountain, forest and lakes kind of guy. Stacy, a Burbank girl (or "Bird-bank" as L calls it), has always been more of a sand and surf person. I've been working it very hard and am slowly luring her over to the dark side. (With our camping trip earlier this summer, I think I'm almost there!) But at any rate, Stacy has been telling me for years how much I would like Tahoe, and I was really excited about getting to finally go.

We stayed on the North Shore at a small place called the Firelite Lodge in Tahoe Vista. It was a nice little place for the price, with a pool and a decent continental breakfast. There were several other kids in other rooms, which greatly abetted my debilitating vacation neurosis. (I almost always suffer from a nearly overwhelming paranoia that my children and their incessant noise are singlehandedly ruining the vacations of dozens of vacationers unfortunate enough to be lodged beneath, directly above, or in any of the rooms within a six room radius of ours.)

The real kicker was the almost deserted sandy beach just across the road. We didn't let the first night pass without some prime lake time. It is one of those beaches that stays knee deep for a hundred feet out, so the kids could truck themselves half a mile from shore and still be well on their feet. L was quite excited to find a dead but fully intact crawfish bobbing hither and yon. It was a plaything tossed merrily about between her and N for a good hour or two. Daddy enjoyed watching Mommy struggle to suppress her own germ neurosis uprising.

The bulk of their energy expended in the waves, the kids were at just the right level of boisterousness to take in a late-night Grandma story. I wish I could say Stacy and I took advantage of the time for a moonlight lakeside stroll or some such fluff, but we really just went back to our room and watched the news. Romance, it seems, never had the dignity of a funeral.

The next morning I woke up before the sun came up. I'd been reading some photography books recently that made it seem like the only way to take a passable picture is to get up when the crack of dawn is still a hairline fracture and set up shop while it is still pitch black. If you're not taking all your pictures between 5am and 6am, say these gurus, then "mediocre," "uninspired," "trite," and "proletariat" are all adjectives too good to be applied to you. A true master, with a true burning passion for his craft, will not hesitate to abandon a perfectly good mattress when all less devoted forms of human life are still clinging to them greedily.

Photography book writers are sadists.

I went out to the lake in my bare feet and sweat shorts and set up my camera. I lasted (I believe) ten minutes at the very most before I ran shivering and stammering back to my warm hotel room like a whimpering, wayward three-year-old. I got a couple of decent shots (most of them cocked at a 30º angle because I didn't bring a tripod and had to balance the camera on a rock), but if that's what it takes to kick it up a notch, I'm doomed to be "bland" and "insipid." I think I can live with that.





By the time I got back to the hotel room L was up, and if left to her own devices, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the family (and all those other unfortunate guests I alluded to earlier) were also up. So taking advantage of my excellent short term memory, I put on some shoes, threw another pair on L, and went back out and down to the lake. It was considerably warmer and brighter by then, so L and I took a little stroll so that her endless jabber could jolt the rest of the lakeside community into the new day.






Once we were well past that brutally early 11am hour, L and N and Stacy and I all braved the thundering surf and took a family kayak ride. I love canoeing and kayaking and was intent on dragging the flock, kicking and screaming if I had to, into the fray. There wasn't much objection. The attendant said we could rent the kayak by the hour or by the half day; I was sure we'd want the half day at least, but she said we didn't have to commit to it before we left; she would just wait and charge us appropriately when we got back. We squeezed ourselves into our petite-sized life preservers that I'm sure were rated for at least 50 lbs., and hauled out. That Celine Dion song was running through my head the entire time.

N rode fore with Stacy while L and I headed aft and took the stern. Her head was perfectly aligned with my kayak paddle and she received a nice little clunk on more than one occasion. It is a sign of a healthy daddy/daughter relationship when you can essentially club your daughter in the head repeatedly and she still loves you.

Notice how low the kayak sat in the back once we put L in!

We set off out into the deep and then bore hard to starboard before striking Flick Point then doubling back along the coast. (I'm very nautical, as I'm sure you've noticed.) L was thoroughly entertained the entire time, at least once she was suitably assured that the Lake Tahoe sharks would be in much deeper waters than those we were traversing. N, however, began wailing shortly after our weighing anchor and maintained his shrieks most of the way across the lake. Stacy and I, wishing for beeswax to plug our ears, paddled on as best we could while the strange inverted kind of Odysseus and the Siren Song thing played itself out.

After a good eight or ten hours contending feverishly with the watery wild, we returned to the safety and security of port and hauled ourselves out of the foaming tumult and up on to dry land; we were exhausted, dehydrated, sun-scorched, but ALIVE!

"That was 45 minutes," said the attendant, "but I'll have to charge you for the full hour."

After the harrowing sea adventure L and N needed some beach time to recoup. N latched on to a friend on the beach (I think his name was Aidan) and followed him around like a groupie as he built elaborate rock castles, mortared with the richest of muds. Aidan quite liked the company and the two chittered back and forth with an intensity that L would have to work up to.





After a quick lunch Gramlynne, Stacy and I took the kids on a new adventure. (Will wonders ever cease!) Miniature golf. The concepts were a little past both of them, but that did not in the slightest diminish their enthusiasm. L displayed a pretty powerful shoulder-to-shoulder drive swing, complete with follow-through, while N showed quite a bit of dexterity in hooking his ball with the topside of his putter and raking it as one would with a hoe into whatever hole he was challenged with. Stacy, who may or may not have gotten in a couple of better shots than me, was simply conceited and annoying. (I've often heard you never really know someone until you putt with them.)

Soon the day arrived when the vacation was over and it was time to hit the road. L and N get strangly sentimental about leaving a hotel. We got in the car and followed Poppa and Gramlynne on down the mountain and south, back to the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.




We hit the June Lake Loop and had lunch with the grandparents in June Lake, and then stopped again in Bishop for a second visit to Mommy and Daddy's favorite way station. While the ride was a long one, the road home always seems to go quicker than the road out and I was actually pretty surprised when we found ourselves amid the tell-tale signs of the greater Los Angeles area. (Sirens, smog, and lots of traffic, to name a few.)