Caroline and I recently had the opportunity to get away for a 6-day vacation to Lake Tahoe.  This all came about when my mom declared “I will be watching my grandsons for a week – whether you and Caroline go somewhere or not”  combine this with two free round-trip tickets burning a hole in my pocket and PRESTO you have the beginnings of a great vacation.

Tahoe was an easy choice since neither of had been there before and would offer a variety of textures and flavors to make it memorable.  The plan was to camp 4-nights and spend the last night in a B&B.

Without going into the boring details as to why, we had to spend a night in a private campground on our first night.  While the campgrounds were clean with nice scenery – it was located across the street from a marina and appeared to be the campground of choice for those who spend their days on the water drinking beer…lots of beer.  So needless to say the campground was a little raucous come sundown.  But thankfully the campground supervisor cruised the grounds at 11:00 barking from his bull horn “IT”S QUIET TIME”. The next morning we made our way over to Sugar Pine Point State Park and set up our tent for the second time in two days.  However, this time we were surrounded by towering pines with some distance between us and our neighbors.

While we had grand plans to mountain bike, climb and basically attempt to see ALL and do ALL that Lake Tahoe has to offer we ended up just relaxing, hiking, spending time catching up with each other and enjoying the fact that we could actually carry on a conversation for more than 10-minutes without interruption.  We also discovered we have now become those people that take great JOY in the silence we experienced as we drove down the road – no kids arguing in the back seat, no Fisher- Price music pouring into our ears and no radio - just the enjoyment of holding hands and taking in the beautiful scenery.

I imagine this is the point were a few of my friends (you know who you are) are disappointed that I haven’t described some epic hike to the tallest point in Lake Tahoe or some other over the top adventure.  Sorry for that, but this was a VACATION not a “guys trip”

We did however enjoy waking up each morning, brewing coffee in our JetBoil french-press and sitting in the shade enjoying our oatmeal, reading books and asking ourselves what do feel like doing today.  Our typical itinerary included a hike, reading in a shady spot by the lake, dinner and photography on the lake at sun down.

We took full advantage of being near so many great restaurants – the dinner of choice for this trip was Sushi and white wine.  This was definitely a first to be eating sushi and camping at the same time.  I highly recommend it! For those that know Caroline, you know she loves her sweets and she was tormented for several evenings as we drove by this ice cream shop that always had a line of people waiting to get in.  The cones we saw walking out the door were enormous! My resistance was for not and we ended up stopping one night to check it out. OMFG! We ordered a single scoop and this thing was as big as Caroline’s head.  I think it took us almost an hour to eat it all.  After that we headed back to camp for our final campfire before packing up the next morning and heading to our B&B.

Our final night  in Tahoe was perfect.  We went to the local market, picked up some cheese, crackers and salami along with a bottle of wine - headed back to the B&B and played Yahtzee on the Patio of the main lodge.

The next morning we packed up and made our way to Reno for our flight home.  We did miss our connection in Lost Wages but luckily we were able to catch a later flight into KC.

I was great seeing the boys again and hearing all about the time they spent with Grandma & Grandpa.

It is important to note that within two days of us being home, both boys had new bikes.  Do you think guilt played a roll in that decision

Here are some pics from the trip.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.