I Explored the Peninsula

On August 7, I wrote about the fourth day that my twin nine year olds had had during our week-long camping trip to Donner Lake. The day before my older sister had visited us from Reno.

We got up that morning at 9:30 and got dressed and fed. The boys were not terribly rebellious. We walked to the small regulation levee on Donner Lake’s outlet lagoon where we found a really interesting green stone in the riprap. I tested its hardness –striking it with the other rocks nearby. The rocks were of various types but I used a piece of granite, which is generally the hardest substance around. I also found slate, which I was able to verify by separating it into individual slabs.

We walked to the beach in the northwest section of the lake – presumably where the Donner Party had been stranded. The boys dug in the sand and I took in the view. Some lady with a rescued greyhound was blowing up a paddleboard. Another lady with a dog deflated her paddleboard. One couple had three short dogs which kept greeting and interacting with us. A familiar looking couple, with a few kids showed up as we left.

We walked to the north of the beach and back to the dam. The boys were sad to leave their sandcastles but they were hungry too. So, we walked to the campsite and I gave them a snack. I found us a shaded spot to get ready to go swimming. The plan was to jump off the rock in the lagoon, do the swings, visit the beach again, go to the island and then finally the spit which protects the lagoon, which I had been calling it the peninsula and the only way to reach it by foot is to walk through the boat ramp

At the rock it was easy, because there were only a few people: kids, some couples. We then swam across the lagoon to try the rope swing but the boys were not as competent as I assumed. Plus there were grass plants in the water and the boys were grossed out by it. I was also completely unprepared for them to hitch a ride from some lady on a paddleboard and to avoid returning!

I discovered that one of the boys had been building a gravel stash at the beach and wanted to return to where we had been earlier that day. So, we were there for a while. The familiar looking family was leaving at that point. I felt like it was a missed opportunity to not chat with them. They seemed friendly but didn’t really talk.

Eventually, it was hot and I wanted to take a dip. So I carried the boys one by one to the island between the lake and the outlet lagoon. The swim was short but the boys were too small. When we were both on the island, I found one of my boys deep in conversation with a lady. The boys both ended up playing fetch with her dog. When the lady and her dog got onto her paddleboard and left, we continued our exploration and set out to swim to the peninsula.

There is an intermittent sandbar which continues all the way out to the island below water, which occasionally is substantial enough to walk on. In fact there was even evidence that there used to be some kind of bridge from the island to the peninsula. I was able to walk halfway to the peninsula but when the water got too deep I ended up swimming over. I took both boys across that way. It turned out to be a lot of work.

There was a pontoon boat with a family on the peninsula. There were also a ton of kids building a sandcastle and that ended up occupying all of our attention for a good while. I explored the peninsula alone – around the small pond. There are a lot of spindly pines which made it difficult and many are dead. When I returned to the sandcastle party on the beach, I fell into chatting with one of the parents of there. They had rented a house on the lake

I took the boys back into the thicket and we slowly made our way up the peninsula to the boat rental. Then we walked over to the rock on the lagoon again. There was a family doing cannonballs trying to get everyone wet. It was really funny. The boys were lazy sitting on the small beach there.

We walked to the campsite then. The boys were crabby but once they had some ramen things were good. We started to wind down for the evening and I consulted the Amtrak site. The train was “on time” and I noted that it was probably half an hour late. I knew that we would need to get up at 6:30 or 645.

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.