Disclaimer: Our two nights at the Holiday Inn Express South Lake Tahoe, were comped. All other expenses, we covered. Photo: Bayview Trail, Desolation Wilderness by Galileo 55 via Flickr (Creative Commons).
I want to write a bit of a shiny post about Lake Tahoe. I would like to talk about how it’s been years since we’ve been there and the things we loved about it on our last trip are still there. Tahoe is beautiful, take your breath away beautiful, the lake is so clean and blue, and the air around the lake smells like lodgepole pines. The drive from Reno Airport is gorgeous; it climbs through the high desert and then, into the forested slopes of the Sierras. Carson City is a pretty western town (and has a microbrewery with a good lunch menu, the High Sierra Brewing Company. Even the flight down is pretty, along the Cascades out of Seattle and then, the flattened breadbasket of Central California.
What I’d like to do is tell you how the cabins still line the lake at Zephyr Cove — we stayed here many years back and loved it; it still looks exactly the same. One of Tahoe’s paddle wheeler day cruises leaves from Zephyr Cove, there’s another that goes from a bit further down the lake at the Riva Grill. The paddle wheeler is fun and cute and lets you look at 360 degrees of mountains surrounding you while you’re out there on the water. The village at Heavenly Valley has changed a lot, there’s lots of new shopping, places selling mediocre artwork and resort wear and burgers and corporate coffee, but off the main drag there are still ramshackle little low rise hotels. There are funky little places selling hippie chow and faux diners where you can get giant breakfasts. You can walk through the casinos, there’s a Harvey’s and a Harrah’s and if you’re lucky, maybe someone will be performing who you actually want to see — Chris Isaak was on the weekend we were there.
I should tell you about the hotel where we stayed, it was the Holiday Inn Express, walking distance to everything we needed to go to — all that stuff I mention and then some, plus, they run a shuttle to the lift if ski season is on. Our room was one of the remodeled ones at the back, away from the main road, so it was quiet. And the Express properties include breakfast and I ate pancakes that came off a conveyer built run machine; I’m quite sure I stood there with my mouth gaping open when the perfect little brown circles appeared. I am comfortable in these mid-range kinds of hotels, they give you coffee and wifi and increasingly better beds, and I appreciate that.
But really, all I can think about from that Tahoe weekend was how my friends R and L got married, lake side. I had been very sick the week before and I was completely overwhelmed by the idea of getting on a flight. I was still fighting with the remains of jet-lag brought on by two weeks in a time zone ten hours away. I had ambitions to roll in a sort of “Fall weekend at Tahoe” web story while I was there for this wedding, and I gathered enough notes, enough mental research, to pull something like that together. I’d planned hand it off before fall rolls into winter and the idea of sitting on a patio in shorts and a hoody is just an absurdity. Sometimes, it seems like a good idea to roll together the personal and professional trips, things become deductible and really, it can be done, I’ve got the opening paragraphs to prove it. But other times, when you’re furiously making notes of where you are and what you ate and how much it costs, you sort of wish you’d just drawn a line around your personal life and your work life.
Oh, yes, I actually am talking about me, and I want — rather, I need — to write a shiny piece about how great Lake Tahoe is in the fall and how you don’t have to stay at those big casinos because there are some good alternatives. Yeah, you could take the shuttle, but the drive from Reno is so lovely if you can do it during the day, and Carson City has an appealing old downtown with wild west history. But I’m still trying to separate the absolute delight of watching those two fine people get married from the worky business of writing a destination piece. I really should have gone for a Tahoe wedding story. That would have done the trick.
I know exactly what you mean about drawing a line between a work and personal trip and that line is becoming harder and harder for me to draw. I have taken two family trips recently and I couldn’t keep myself from writing, even when things were not even comped and I had no responsibility to write about them. Someone asked me the other day about our “vacation” and I found myself saying “well, it was really more of a work trip”…. Everywhere we went and everything we did, I was either taking mental or actual notes. It’s just part of becoming a travel writer, I guess. Every trip becomes an exercise in writing.
Sometimes, sometimes, it is better just to not be a writer/photgrapher/record-keeper-for-others and just be.
I like those mid range places too–for all the same reasons!
What a gorgeous photo. Love the near, mid, far perspectives. That blue. I could just eat it. And isn’t it interesting how stories have a way to taking control of themselves and demanding to be written in their own way? I have a zillion stories I *should* write, that I started to write, that I think I will write. And that live, half-written, with a great opening and/or lede, on my hard drive. Sigh.
Kim, it IS pretty, and I can’t take credit for it, it’s a Flickr/Creative Commons pull. And even while it’s pretty, I know that Tahoe is prettier still, and that picture does small justice to the crazy blue of that lake.
I’m not of the “this stuff just writes itself” school, but sometimes, it kind of does…