Surprise-Surprise!!! Tahoe 1990

Like I said in my last post, I promise that after this Tahoe post we will actually start going some other places on our vacations. We will always come back to Tahoe, but it won't be the only place we go! Really, I promise! But, if you are bored to death you can skip this post.

This year my children are 6 and 8. They are getting to the age where my son drives my daughter nuts just by being in the same room. It's not really anything in particular that he does...he just is. They have begun to have different interests and have made more friends outside of the neighborhood and each other. That being said, any parent out there probably knows what comes next. The sheer terror of a 10 hour car ride stuck in the backseat of a car with someone that you don't want to be with.

My children always had a plastic bin of toys, game boys and cassette players between them. (Yes, they had cassette players. This is before the days of Ipods.) It was supposed to sit in the middle of the center seat, giving each child the same amount of room in the backseat. At some point during this trip, my daughter decided that it was on her side perhaps a centimeter too much. He was breathing in the backseat and SOMETHING needed to be done! ANYTHING!! She didn't care just as long as she no longer had to deal with her brother. Being the creative thinker that she was, she took a boat oar and ran it from the back seat to the front dashboard. Then she hung a towel over the oar, set the toy basket dead center and informed her brother that he was not to even think about moving the towel, the oar or, heaven forbid, the toy basket. We eventually made it to Tahoe without them killing each other.

Once there, they were the world's best of friends again. A fun two weeks began. We did the usual river rafting, pancake breakfast eating, hay riding, swimming, hiking and blue jay feeding that we always did.

This was also the year that our weather was weird. In past years, I had always taken way too many warm clothes. We might have worn a pair of jeans a couple of times, but never enough to warrant more than one pair. This year, I decided to just bring one pair each. We had snow in the higher elevations and it was darn right cold several days. I had to go to the Laundromat after everyone had put their jammies on and wash our jeans. The poor things could almost stand up on their own! We also had a lot of wind. This is a picture of Lake Tahoe with wind caused white caps.



This is probably the trip that we introduced the kids to "Sneaky." Sneaky is a game that my sister and I used to play after my mom had put us to bed. We would try to quietly sneak into the other sister's room without them hearing us (or mom) and whisper "Sneaky!" The idea, of course, was to scare the other person. It wasn't one of our most thought out games, because it usually got us into trouble. After all, when you scare someone they usually make noise. Sometimes we would be crawling into each other's rooms and run into the other person crawling into ours. This would cause hysterical laughter and we would still get into trouble. Trouble or not, it made for many years of fun.

At the cabin, the idea is to sneak up on someone in their sleeping bag without them hearing the floor creak. This takes some planning. Sometimes, while someone is taking a shower, you make your sleeping bag look slept in and hide under the person's bed. You get the idea. After they have laid down, you lie in wait and then yell "sneaky!!" Good times.....lol. To this day, we play Sneaky when we are at the cabin.

This vacation cost us $450.00. Next up.....drum roll......The Grand Canyon!