Just a lil selfie I took on our balcony with my grandpa's old Lake Tahoe shirt :)
This past weekend my family took a trip to Lake Tahoe to get away from the heat of the Central Valley and to take a break from work and our regular day-to-day, of course. We had such a wonderful time on our longest family vacation ever (it’s not much to a lot of people, but for us it was a big deal). Since we had so much fun, I wanted to share all the details with you here.
It’s about a five-hour drive from our house to South Lake Tahoe. I slept most of the way there, so there isn’t much to say about that. We didn’t actually stay in South Lake Tahoe; our room was in Stateline, NV, but we spent a lot of time in SLT during our trip. Our room was really great. It was like an apartment with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and more of a kitchen than I ever had when I lived in the dorm suites in college. I wish I could have just moved in and lived there. The room had a huge balcony with a barbeque and a nice view of the pines. When we got there on Friday, we settled into our room for a little bit before going out to dinner. We had a reservation for the Beach House at 7:30 and we couldn’t have chosen a better place for that first night. The restaurant is right on the beach and we had a spectacular view of the sunset over the lake. Everyone else seemed to like their food, and mine was absolutely delicious. I got the Blue Burger, which is a burger with blue cheese on it. I can’t even describe to you how good this burger was. The flavors were absolutely amazing, and even though there was kind of a lot of blue cheese and it wasn’t super evenly spread across the whole bun, I couldn’t have been happier. On the other hand, the tropical macaroni salad was pretty disappointing. It was macaroni, whatever creamy dressing or sauce you typically put on macaroni salad, three tiny slices of celery, and itty bitty pineapple chunks that I wouldn’t have even known were there if nobody had told me. The burger and the view made up for it tenfold so we’re good.
Sunset view from the Beach House restuarant in South Lake Tahoe
After that, we split up for a little bit. My dad brought me to Harrah’s so I could gamble for the first time, while my mom and sister walked around the nearby shops. All I wanted to do was play a slot machine with an actual lever, which isn’t as common anymore. Most of the games in there are digital unless you go over to where the real poker, craps, baccarat, etc. tables are. We were able to find some machines with levers and I got to play those a few times. We also found video poker and played a few hands each. We didn’t win anything all that notable, just one or two credits here and there before we lost all our money. Personally, I found that gambling, at least in that modality, is boring to me and I spend more time stressing out about watching my number of credits continue to go down than having fun, and I find it to be fairly boring. But I also can’t express to you how glad I am that I got to go try and I think my dad was excited to be able to show me how things work. I also had a lot of fun walking around watching people drink, smoke, gamble, and just act silly outside the normal context of everyday life. When we met back up with my mom and sister, they told us that they saw a pretty big bear walking down the street in the middle of all of the commotion of Friday night near the casinos. They said it only took a couple of minutes for it to realize that it didn’t really want to be there and walk back into the hills, but that’s still so crazy that they got to witness that.
The next day I accidentally slept in way too late and missed the yoga class that the resort we stayed in was offering, which was a bummer, especially because a lot of the sleep I got during those morning hours was filled with really horrible nightmares. It took me a long time to really wake up and get out of that headspace before I could get going and enjoy my day. While my dad and sister went out to scout some things out nearby, my mom and I stayed back and read our books together out on the balcony, which was a great time. I finished the book I was reading, Part of Your World by Liz Braswell (more to come on that very soon). When everyone was back in the room, we decided to head out to Carson City and see what the capital of Nevada is like. We had lunch at a cute place called Squeeze In, and the food was pretty good. I wish I had gotten a different type of meat than chorizo in my breakfast burrito, but that’s truly on me; they did perfectly in delivering what I asked for. After we ate we walked around some of the stores on the neighboring blocks; we went into a crystal shop and a coin shop, my mom and I got drinks at a coffee shop, and my dad and sister went to a ceramics shop and a military antiques shop.
When we all got back in the car, we headed just down the road to drive by the Capitol building and some of the other nearby government buildings before we found the Nevada State Museum. We weren’t sure if we wanted to go in, but we decided to give it a go and we were so glad we did, at least my mom and I were. They had some pretty interesting animal specimens to look at, a moderately acceptable exhibit about Native American history, but most notably a really great underground mining exhibit. It was really impressive how much detail was put into the exhibit to really showcase what mining was like back in the day. As a history teacher, my mom was really blown away too so the entry fee of $10 per person (free for kids under 17) was totally worth it. After the museum, we headed back to our home base to work on what we were going to do for dinner. My dad and sister went to the grocery store to get steak, salmon, rice, and a salad so we could cook and eat in our room. My dad grilled up the steak and salmon out on the balcony and when everything came together we sat down at the dinner table and dug in. The salmon was delicious, and the steak was pretty darn good too. The rice was one we hadn’t tried before and I enjoyed it a lot, plus our salad had artichokes, tomatoes, and asparagus, which was also very nice. My dad taught us an Italian card game called Pidro since his cousin had told me he was surprised my dad had never taught us how to play. It’s a fairly confusing game, but once you start playing, you kind of get the hang of it. I would love to play again sometime.
Sunday we had big plans for a day out on the lake in a rental boat. We got on our boat around 10am and headed out into the lake. I got to try tubing for the first time, which was so much fun I did it two separate times. I am afraid of open water, though, so when I first jumped in and had to wait for my dad and sister to set up the tube and the rope I was having a hard time breathing even though I had a life jacket on. Once I got myself together again and the tube was ready, I had such a blast riding around, feeling the water on my feet, and taking in the view. Much better than being in the water myself. We tooled around for a while, explored Emerald Bay, and enjoyed lunch on the boat. We had fixings for three different types of sandwiches, so I opted for egg salad and it was delicious. We had chips, grapes, cookies, carrots, all kinds of things to choose from. I got to sit in the sun and read with my mom some more, which was a lot of fun for me. My sister and I also tried to learn how to water ski, but it’s really hard so neither of us ever really got the hang of it after trying several times. Maybe next time we get on a boat like that we can try again. I was just really proud of myself for going out and trying it because a lot of the time you spend learning is just hanging out in the water, waiting for the boat to come back, and putting your skis back on, so it was a big deal that I was able to do that without being too scared. We had such a wonderful time out there and I wouldn’t trade it for the world, truly.
Having a blast on the raft (left) and the gorgeous view from the trail to the lake (right)
However, one of the unfortunate outcomes of our boat day is that my sister and I are pretty severely sunburnt and it takes two types of over-the-counter painkillers to make it tolerable enough to live life right now. We wore sunscreen and I reapplied some on my thighs, but I’m pretty badly burnt on most of my body. Back, shoulders, thighs, face, chest, legs, all burnt to various degrees. It’s pretty awful. The other thing is that the boat rental situation seemed super sketchy and we were right and we’re still figuring out what happened and what to do about it. It’s very complicated and confusing, but we’re honestly just really glad we still got to have such a great time out on Lake Tahoe. We were so beat up after such a long day, that we ended up getting some hot food from Whole Foods for dinner. We don’t have Whole Foods where I live, nor would we be Whole Foods people if we had one anyway, so it was kind of fun to do something outside of what we normally do, plus have ready-made food that we could take back to the room and eat comfortably in our pajamas. I think we all knocked out pretty early from the long day, or at least I definitely did. I don’t even remember falling asleep, it kind of just happened and my mom said she had to turn off the light next to my side of the bed since I fell asleep with it on.
It’s Monday afternoon as I’m writing this and this morning I woke up at 5:30. Good thing it was time to get up and start packing because I was in so much pain from my sunburns that there was no going back to sleep for me. We packed everything up in the car and hit the road. The ride back was not too bad, other than the car saying we had serious tire pressure issues even though all of the tires all seemed to have perfectly fine pressure. Surprisingly I did not sleep on the ride, which is super abnormal for me on a road trip. I had a great time listening to The Basement Yard, looking at things on Pinterest, and I actually had a few pretty great ideas come to mind, which is exciting!
Some special views from our balcony
Overall, it was a really great trip and I’m so grateful that we got to go, stay as long as we did, and that we all mostly got along well. I hope everyone else feels as fulfilled as I do after this trip. I feel inspired to work on the things I was thinking about all weekend to make my life even better as I adjust back to my routine. Yay!
Love always <3
Nicole
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