Tahoe City

On August 2, 2023, my second night with my boys at the Donner Lake Campground, I wrote that the boys had gone to sleep soon after I wrote in my notebook the night before. I had done a great job of dressing warm and fell asleep at an appropriate hour.

I had checked the bus schedules and the timing for our transfers and figured out that we had to be up at six. When I was up, I set out food and got myself ready for the day. Then I got the boys up and encouraged them to prepare for their day until about seven.

I was a bit frazzled but we made it to the bus stop by eight. In fact we were early since the bus was a bit late. We transferred at Safeway and when we were on the 89 bus on Highway 89 I was ecstatic. I showed the boys the rocks above the canyon and the other points of interest.

A guy sitting next to me practically told me his life story – which included working on lifts in Olympic Valley. The driver asked if I had gone to High Sierra music festival, and I revealed that I had known the promoter.

At Tahoe city the TART Connect guy graciously drove us to the laundromat. I started a load and then we went shopping for snacks and other stuff. After that, we went to Rosies and had pancakes. I also rotated the laundry in between bites of pancakes.

Once we had gotten the laundry squared away we walked across the street to the beach and I was really happy with the result. I got a quarter mile out and the lake was still only 6 feet deep. We found a rock to sit on a short distance out. It was warm and the boys actually swam. We also enjoyed the view.

After that we switched gears to enjoy the local playground. They played a bit with the other boys, but I mostly set wet clothing out etc. The kids the boys were playing with were apparently a lot of fun.

When we were done we went to the dam separating Lake Tahoe from the Truckee River and had some snacks at the cantina there. Then we took the bus back to Truckee and onward. Transferring took a long time, but once we hiked back to the camnp site, things were great.

The boys had some toy slingshots they had picked up at the corner store the day before. A little girl played with them and I noted that when her parents stopped through they turned out to be friendly.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.