Tahoe

While we were at the lake, we stayed near Carnelian Bay in this humble abode. 

It worked out great for our family. It was way up at the top of a hill and the neighborhood was so quiet. Our boys were pretty much the only thing making noise around there. That is, until my mom and dad went on a walk and found a mama bear and her two cubs. My mom came running back to get the rest of us and we all paraded down the street to try to get a decent picture. This is all we got with our camera.

We spent most of our days at various beaches. Our good friends came up from Auburn and captured this shot of the eight of us. Clearly, the boys missed the memo about wearing sunglasses.

We went to Sand Harbor, my favorite beach. 

We all jumped off a rock. Garrett...

Matthew...

Troy...

And I did it too but the picture is on my mom's camera. I jumped once. "I didn't get it," my mom called from shore. I jumped again. "Tell me you got it that time," I yelled. She shook her head no. Third time was the charm so, in theory, a picture of me jumping off the rock exists.

We caught crawdads. My brother and I used to do this for hours at a time when we were kids. I don't know what's so appealing about it but my kids LOVE doing it now and, well, as you can see, apparently so do my brother and I. Still.

The Truckee River was REALLY low so we didn't spend money to raft. On one of the days I floated down a short portion of the river with the boys. We had one tube and one floaty raft thingy. Garrett was in the tube and Matthew and I turned the float sideways and flopped onto it. We each grabbed on to one handle on Garrett's tube and away we went. It was all fun and games until the float sprung a rather large leak and we went over some rapids. The rapids were very tiny and not at all a big deal except that I was trying to keep the boys from crashing into rocks. I took quite a few boulders to the shins. The boys laughed and laughed as we bounced over rocks and I yelled, "OH! OW! UH! THERE'S ANOTHER ONE!" Then we stopped in the middle of the rapids and I pinned Garrett up against a boulder with my thigh, held onto Matthew with one arm, and blew the float back up. It held enough air to get us down to where everyone else was hanging out. When we were done, we played in the river for a little while until a thunder storm drove us away.

My dad took the boys fishing.

Garrett caught one tiny fish and one minuscule fish. This one was the tiny fish. The mini fish was even smaller than this guy. Obviously, we returned them to their natural habitat since they would have fed approximately no one.

Matthew didn't have any luck. But he had fun hanging out with his grandpa.

We ate at our favorite spots. My mom, Heather and I ate at Hacienda del Lago on the night that the boys were backpacking. Together, we all had dinner at Bridgetender and breakfast at Fire Sign Cafe.

It doesn't matter how long we have or how often we go, our time at the lake always comes to an end much too quickly. This time, though, we didn't have to come home after our trip. When our time in Tahoe ended, the boys and I still had two weeks left. We headed down to southern California...