Reflections of My Travel

Getting up for work was slightly easier today. Not by much, but adjustment is adjustment right? Sometime while we were working Sylvia took the kids to a friend’s house for the weekend and loaded up the car. After work, we four started on a little road trip for some national park adventures. It was a long, slow, winding ride but we finally made it to Visalia, CA (as opposed to Vidalia, GA – I’m easily amused, you know). We had a nice swim at the hotel and I’m ready for an early day tomorrow.

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Back to work today, which meant getting started at 05:00 in order to be inline with Eastern Time. Ugh. Granted, it’s not as hard as getting to work at 02:00 like we did in Hawaii, but it did hurt nonetheless. Once our workday was finished, it was decided that we would all head to the beach at Lake Tahoe (it just seems wrong to call it a beach when it’s at a lake). First, let me tell you that it is absolutely ungodly hot here. We’re talking 105° and no matter what they say about dry heat – it’s just friggin hot! The only good thing I can say about “dry heat” is that my hair stays pretty all day long in it. Yep, I can leave it down and not look like a giant poof-ball around here. Anyhow, the temperature at the lake was very nice. There was a breeze blowing and it was slightly overcast. I didn’t actually go in the water, opting to nap in the sun instead, but I heard reports that it was rather frigid. I’m sure it couldn’t have been any colder than the river we rafted/swam in over the weekend. The beach was pretty dirty. The sand was covered in soot, ash, and coals from the fire a couple of weeks ago. We all came out of there with at least black feet. The kids who had been buried in the sand by Randal and Brian were pretty well coated in black. It did make for a nice respite from all of the insufferable heat and the lake was very pretty. I even got the slightest bit of a tan.

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The original plan was that we were going to go sailing on Lake Tahoe today with a friend of theirs and watch fireworks from the lake. Their friend canceled on them, which turned out to be fine because we were tired from all of the rafting and camping fun. We mostly lounged around and finally gathered up to go out to dinner and then to the high school in Carson City to watch fireworks. The fireworks were decent but I was surprised that there was no musical accompaniment for them. The display was silent (other than the big BOOMs, of course). It was the first Fourth of July fireworks that I have ever been to that had no patriotic tunes in accompaniment.