You can't live in Northern California for long without hearing tales about beautiful Lake Tahoe and what an amazing place it is to visit - winter, spring, summer or fall! So, after a year and a half living within driving distance, we decided to make a visit and check it out for ourselves. Our experience certainly did not disappoint!
We were able to score a great Priceline deal on a room at the Resort at Squaw Creek. I didn't know this at the time, but Squaw Creek was home of the 1960 Winter Olympics! We had an amazing time exploring the resort and seeing the remnants of the Olympic games in that area. Our first stop of a visit up to the Olympic Village. They built a base for the Olympic events down at the base of the resort and another one up 6,000 feet! We took a gondola up the mountain and the ride itself was a very exciting part of the adventure. The girls were both quite brave, but you can see here that they were very curious about the houses and trees that kept getting smaller and smaller below them!
Our first stop when we reached the upper village was to check out their mountaintop hot tub! It was so cruel of me to make them pose for this picture, but the image of those sweet girls in their swimsuits standing next to those giant drifts of snow was just too priceless! (plus, I was in my suit too...)
A view of the whole valley from the top of the Olympic Village. It was just stunning!
Although Kylan and I both have very fond memories of skiing/snowboarding and were looking forward to sharing those experiences with the girls, we just couldn't swallow the Tahoe prices. One day of ski passes, rentals, and lessons for the girls would have topped $750 and we just decided that we didn't love it quite that much! We'll introduce them to skiing in UT =)
So, instead of skiing, we had a giant snowball fight...
...and we went sledding. The spring weather was perfect for playing outside and we could have sledded for hours - if the snowcats hadn't come to kick us out! Because the weather was so nice and warm, the snow was pretty slushy and Kylan was such a good sport to pull those girls up the hill again, and again, and again!
The next day we decided to take a drive all the way around the lake. We were completely overwhelmed with the beauty of the lake and stopped at a dozen overlook sites just like this one to try to capture the view. (After the gondola ride, Serelle became pretty nervous about heights and was not very excited about this photo location!)
We discovered a fun surprise at the rest stop above, which was a path down to a Nordic castle. Back in the 1920's, one of San Francisco's wealthy families decided to build their summer resort in the Scandinavian style. The "castle" still stands, but was closed for winter, so we hiked around and tried to look in all the windows! The building was really unique and beautiful and the location, with it's own private docks on the lake, was just stunning. I wouldn't mind a summer home like that some day...
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