vacation day 2

Tahoe Day 2 was about as intense a vacation day as I ever hope to survive.

I didn’t quite get out the door at 6AM, but I did gear up and start pedaling by 7:36 according to Strava. The loop I chose was tricky in places due to the all-pervasive summertime roadwork around here. The initial stretch north on 28 around the lake, the climb out of town on 267 and the return along 89 were all marked by construction dust, washboard-rough shoulders, and hand-waves to beg the indulgence of the drivers as I avoided the “cone zone”.

But despite all that, there were plenty of mitigating factors. The construction couldn’t completely obscure the lovely scenery as I climbed out of King’s Beach, and once I hit Brockway Summit…

… all of a sudden the road turned to fresh asphalt, the traffic thinned out (or, perhaps more appropriately, I started keeping pace with it — I apparently hit 47 mph at one point) and my Della Santa started singing underneath me. The flat stretch into Truckee felt great and I even managed to hit a nice rhythm on the ice-cracked pavé-ment of Hwy 89 back towards Lake Tahoe.

So I pushed it back home and made it right at the time I’d predicted in the note I left for Jen. The house was just waking up and I quickly scrubbed up and got ready for our next activity: geocaching. Well, first espresso, then geocaching. First espresso, then wandering about for too long trying to find cache treasures, then geocaching. Well — in all honesty I suck as a navigator and should not be allowed to vector us in to unknown caches. It looked so promising! A very friendly trailhead and a trail that’s even marked on google maps, but we’d approached the cache from the wrong side and it just didn’t go well for us. We had a tough 90-minute bushwhacking slog that ended up with Jen and Gunnar hanging out in the shade while the dog and I ran back uphill to get the car.

Everyone was a good sport about it though and we regrouped back at the condo, recharged with some lunch, reëxamined the maps, and set out again with firm purpose. This time — success! We found the lovely Dollar Reservoir just as the cache page described. Gunnar got his first actual mostly-un-assisted find, Jen pulled the travel bug she’d been gunning for, Laswell got to swim in a serene, idyllic pond and I got to (mostly) redeem myself as navigator.

We were so energized after the find that we paused at the condo only long enough to change clothes and head back down to Skylandia Park to hit the beach. Ah, Skylandia! It sounds like the name of the king’s realm in a second-rate Zelda knockoff. But in reality it’s a gorgeous state park and public beach where we ran out the remainder of the daylight splashing, exploring, fetching and ogling (respectively, as above).

Here’s two out of the four:

The daylight thus spent, we headed back in for dinner and decompression. Thus I give you this writeup. Yes, it’s a colossal disappointment - I completely failed on the “nap-a-day” goal, but I intend to make up for it by being asleep by ten PM. There’s always tomorrow.