Lake Tahoe

On a fairly last minute whim we took ourselves off to San Francisco on the 1st of January. Mainly to spend a week with Jo aka Juanita Banana but also for a spot of skiing at Lake Tahoe - seeing as there is no sign of snow in Spain this winter.

Lake Tahoe is about 3 or 4 hours drive from San Fran, on the boarder of California and Nevada. You actually change states at one point whilst skiing - which is quite a novelty. Lake Tahoe is a lesser known ski resort (outside of America) but its actually enormous. I think it has the largest area for skiing of all the resorts in America. Its not that high, but high enough - about 7ooo feet. There are loads of different resorts (I think about 8 if you count North lake shore and south lake shore) all around the lake area and each resort has about 20 slopes. We stayed at the South Lake Shore area and skiied at Kirkwood one day and at Heavenly the following day. The photo of the lake is the view from Heavenly.

We were lucky in that fresh powder snow just kept on falling. inches and inches of it. I'd never skiied in those conditions before. Its amazing how different it is. You have to jump up in the air quite a bit more on your turns to avoid getting wedged in it. Its great. Jose was enjoying it so much as its been years since he has experienced such great snow. He was doing all sorts of fancy turns and even went down a slope that had jumps on it for snowboarders. Jo and I didn't see what happened down there as we gave that one a miss! We both (Jo and I) did really well though - considering we are still quite new to this game. We were both pleased with ourselves and really enjoyed it. Jo took a bad fall at one point but that was because we took a wrong turning and came face to face with a section of double diamond black slope (the hardest rated in America). I got down it no problem but Jo went absolutely flying, lost a ski, two poles, and spent a good few seconds skiiding on her head. She survived it though - without any tears (good strong yorkshire lass that she is).

We kept intending to go to the casino or out for a few drinks after skiing ......but it never happened. Skiing is really tiring and we are over 30 now! We went out for meals, had wine with meal and one night stretched to one cocktail and then flopped into bed ready for the next day's early start. Our Mum's would be proud.

We actually thought we might be stuck there in lake Tahoe as the day we were due to leave there was a blizzard storm brewing and the news said you couldn't get out unless you had snow chains or snow tyres on a 4x4. Well we had hired a lovely big Cherokee Jeep but we didn't actually know if it had snow tyres on it or not and set off anyway. I think we did have them though because we passed a kind of check point on the road where everyone was pulling over to put the snow chains on and the check point was manned by officials but they just waved us through. So they could either see that we had good enough tyres or they were assuming so! We got through ok though, slowly but surely. I loved driving the Jeep actually. It was very luxurious but quite an animal. I did all the driving because Jose can't find his licence anywhere and if you don't present your licence at the rent a car place then you are not insured, and America is not a place to take any risks without insurance.

I'm going to do individual entries for other things that we did so watch out for more photos and more write ups of San Fran. If Jo is reading this - can you hurry up and send me the shooting photos so that I can do one on that. Thanks Babe.

See y'all

S xx