I’m on this new kick, as many of my friends know, to be always fierce and unafraid. Fiercely unafraid even. A couple of months ago I let it all go, all fear, all anxiety, all despair, and now live my life to the fullest every single day. Part of that involved booking the trips I said I was going to take. Hence, this “let go and travel,” piece.
Inspired, I booked my trip to Disneyland, with no money and no credit cards. My daughter’s fifth birthday had passed and I had been telling her we would go to Disneyland after she turned five. Damnit, we were going. Booked.
I also went online and booked another camping trip. My husband loves camping, my daughter loves camping, and I had only booked one group trip for the summer. It was kind of scary for me because I have an infant, but c’mon, let’s be real. We weren’t backpacking into the middle of nowhere. We were ten minutes off a major highway in the middle of fancy town wine country for our first trip.
This second trip I booked in South Lake Tahoe. Carlos and I had gone a couple times previously but never with our kids. We really like the area, both for summer and winter, and it is super kid and family friendly. I went online in July and found one (one!) spot left at Fallen Leaf campground. It had to be a fluke. Someone must have just cancelled it right as I went online.
Serendipitously, that’s how life has been since Iet it all go and decided to do all the things I have always wanted to do. The doors just open. I barely even knock sometimes, and the doors just open.
The Trip
Off we went, in the car, mid afternoon, with me and two kids in the backseat. My eight month old screams her head off in the car if I’m not with her. It is easier just to sit in the backseat with the kids. Plus, my husband gets to feel like a chauffeur. Lucky him. We headed to South Lake Tahoe on a Friday during rush hour. I booked three nights; we were coming home Monday morning. The drive to Tahoe from the Bay Area is an easy one. Highway 80 takes you to Highway 50, and before you know it, BAM!, you’re coming down a mountain and looking at Lake Tahoe.
We have two kids, though, one of which is super easy and will chill with her iPad for four and a half hours. The other one, at eight months old, not so chill. We had to stop after her afternoon nap for a feeding (and Starbucks!). Then we stopped again for dinner and a feeding (In N Out!) and by then it had already been three hours.
It was getting dark at six thirty as we sat with our burgers and fries in South Sacramento. I was tired. My husband was tired. My five year old was wired, and my baby was over the carseat. I knew I wanted to make it to Lake Tahoe, but I also knew that I did not want to hold my baby in the dark and deal with an overtired rambunctious five year old on a naked campground while my husband pitched our massive cabin tent by vehicle headlights.O
On a Whim
“So… you wanna get a hotel?” I asked him.
“Can we afford it?” He asked me back.
“We can afford it. Is it an extra expense we weren’t counting on? Sure.” I responded. “But do you really want to pitch a tent in the dark? Wouldn’t you rather just get into Tahoe, settle down in a bed tonight, and deal with the wilderness tomorrow?”
“Can we get breakfast buffet?” My husband is obsessed (obsessed!) with breakfast buffet in hotels. In his mind, he should not be paying all that money for a hotel room with no breakfast included, and not a continental donut or cereal either. He wants the full on eggs and bacon with tables and chairs deal. This means that unless I book us a place with a kitchen where we can cook, I book hotels that offer a breakfast included option.
This night, only hours from when we planned on checking in, the only hotel I could find in our price range (I hate to spend more than $300 on a hotel, and I’d much rather spend closer to $200) that offered breakfast was the Lake Tahoe Resort Hotel. I booked it.
Lake Tahoe Resort Hotel
We got in to South Lake Tahoe at about ten o’clock. Fortunately, the valet was waiting for us. It was freezing outside already. I’m from the Bay Area. You will be hard pressed to find me in anything other than a tank top no matter the season. My girls are the same. Here we were, in tanks and shorts and freezing. We hustled inside while my husband grabbed our bags and handed our keys off to the valet.
The moment we walked into the resort I knew I had chosen well. This hotel is open in the center up to the glass ceiling. You walk into the middle and you can see the balconies of all the floors of hotels along the edges and the middle is all open space. The elevators are glass, so you can see inside them and the riders can see out while they are ascending or descending. It felt magical. The check in was a breeze; we walked past a babbling brook, took the elevator to the third floor and found our room.
The Room
To my surprise, the room had a separate bedroom and living area. I could put the kids to bed and hang out with my husband. What actually ended up happening is that my husband put the kids to bed, fell asleep while doing so, and I stayed up writing. Married life. The hotel has free basic wifi which you can upgrade for a fee. I opted not to pay. My service was just fine. We slept well that night, me with the baby in one queen bed and Carlos with our five year old in the other queen.
We woke up the next morning and headed down for breakfast. The buffet was good. The coffee was delicious. Again, you can pay a fee to upgrade your meal to an omelette, but we opted for the basic bacon, eggs, fruit, toast, and yogurt. The bacon was a bit limp, but I think that’s because it’s that precooked bacon from Costco that you pop in the microwave. Everything else was good. I went back to our room to put Matilda down for her morning nap, and Carlos and Celaya headed to the indoor pool. They said the pool was very nice, and of course, my kid made a friend.
All in all we paid $250 for the room, breakfast included, and valet parking. It was worth it. When we go back to Tahoe for snowboarding I will definitely choose this place.
The Campground
Next we headed up the road to Fallen Leaf Campground. It is about five minutes north of Camp Richardson, the big camping resort attraction in South Lake Tahoe. The hosts at Fallen Leaf were super sweet older ladies who warned us upon check in that the campground is “very bear active.”
Great. Now I get to have bear nightmares all weekend. No, really. I did.
The ladies said that just the night previous someone had left food on their picnic table and two bears had visited the site. Of course I locked everything, right down to deodorant and toothpaste (anything smelly), in the bear locker.
First, my husband set up our giant tent, we drove the twenty minutes back into town for a few extra supplies at Safeway, and we had our campfire dinner.
As we ate burgers, I fed Matilda some carrots, and she splattered some on her footie pajamas. All night long, I lay on the air mattress with her nestled in the crook of my arm, imagining a voracious black bear bursting through the tent and grabbing my baby for the smear of carrots on her arm.
We never saw a bear. Not one. All weekend. Not even a sniffle outside the tent of a bear following the faint scent of baby carrots on a baby’s arm.
Drama averted.
Fallen Leaf Lake
Fallen Leaf is a beautiful campground with a stunning little lake attached to it. It is cold, of course, because it is at the foot of some pretty snowy mountains even in the summer, but it isn’t as cold as Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe is the third largest lake in North America, so it is always freezing. Freezing. Fallen Leaf lake is a short walk, a quarter mile tops, from all of the campsites. Unless you get lost on a random trail that you shouldn’t have taken in the first place (who? me?)
Once you approach Fallen Leaf lake as you come over a small ridge, you can’t believe you never knew it was there. It is a beautiful little gem hidden away in a mountain basin.
The only downside to any lake is that few of them have sandy beaches; most offer rocks, gravel, and sticks. Fallen Leaf is no different. Bring a thick, padded picnic blanket that will act as a buffer between your soft butt and the rocky ground.
We spent the afternoon at the lake and then headed into Camp Richardson for a stop at the ice cream parlor and some sightseeing. Then we headed into South Lake Tahoe for Starbucks and Chinese food.
South Lake Tahoe
I got a writing piece done about a friend who recently had gastric bypass surgery, and my husband sent some work emails off.
This luxury is one of the joys of camping in Tahoe: easy access to wifi, which is essential to a neurotic beer salesman and a budding writer unwilling to take a break from her writing.
As we sat in Starbucks just across the street from Lake Tahoe, my husband and I had another moment: “Do you really want to try to make it back to our campsite to cook and then clean? We’ll be doing dishes in the dark. With bears.” I asked him.
“Hm. But I don’t want more bread. No burgers.” He said.
“Chinese?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Yay! Chinese food!” My daughter was thrilled.
Once more, as luck, fortune, or fate, would have it, Hunan Garden was five minutes down the road from our campsite, on the way back from Starbucks. We stopped, we ate really good Chinese buffet, the waiters stopped by our table frequently to play with Matilda in her high chair, and we made it back to our tent for bed.
Headed Home
On our way out of town the next morning, literally right on the side of the road on the way home, we had an excellent breakfast at Bert’s Cafe. The waitstaff was friendly, the food was fresh, and there was no wait time.
We stopped in Placerville on our way home, which is about an hour and a half south of Tahoe, because Matilda woke up and wanted to eat. Perfect. I love Placerville. It is the most adorable little town at any time of year. Little shops line the streets downtown, and a giant bell tower rings on the hour. We always stop at Centro Coffee House for coffee, right across from the bell tower. I stopped in, ordered our coffees and pastries, fed Matilda, and chatted up the girl behind the counter. Brittney happened to be going through a rose gold obsession like the one I am going through right now, and she had just painted her nails. They sparkled and glittered rose gold in the light, and I called my daughter over to see. Celaya loves painting her nails, so she stared longingly at Brittanie’s nail art.
Unsurprisingly, the coffee was fabulous, and we headed back up the street toward our car, carrying our coffees and trading off carrying the baby. Celaya and I peeked into Eco Logical, a little eco friendly art and jewelry store across from Centro, and I fell in love with some pretty gold costume jewelry that is also (bonus!) fair trade and eco friendly.
The Lighthouse
Before we got to the car, as we meandered up Main Street, we wandered into a little gift shop called The Lighthouse, with brightly colored iron peacocks and roosters sitting in the shop doorway. A bell dinged as we walked through the door, and a friendly, very mellow man in his fifties greeted us, “welcome. welcome.”
We took our time here because he told me after I found something I liked that if I bought three things over five dollars I would get ten percent off. Well, who could pass that up? The problem was that I wanted everything, and there were cute little tchotchkes in every nook and cranny of the tiny store. Butterfly light bulbs hung from the ceiling, coffee mugs with every saying you can imagine sat on shelves, and crystal jewelry swung from wooden racks. I ended up picking out a couple of Christmas presents for my family. When you have more than ten people just in your immediate family, you can never start shopping too early.
My daughter chatted up a nice lady arranging her art in the store, telling her all about how the earth was made: “You see, there were these dying stars, and all this energy, and the energy got faster and hotter, and then there was this big bang!”
I listened to all this from around a corner as I checked out, got my ten percent off, and we said goodbye. We hit the road again, me in the backseat to keep my infant from screaming her head off.
Well Rested
By the time we got home it was early afternoon and we were rested, relaxed, and happy to be home.
This was the first time we quite literally just went with the flow. I am sorry we had to toss some chicken that we didn’t barbecue, and a few other things that sat in the cooler with the chicken, but in the end, it was worth it. When the mood struck us, we went with it. Sure, we probably spent at extra three hundred dollars we wouldn’t have otherwise spent, but we did not stress out once, we ate what we wanted, when we wanted, we rested well, we laughed and joked, we swam and enjoyed fresh coffees, both from the campfire and from the local shops. We actually, gasp, vacationed on our vacation. I’ll take a few extra writing gigs and pay off the extra expense.
So that’s how we camped, one night in a hotel room, two unplanned meals out, and a some very light roughing it. No bears. If you want to feel like you’re camping, dirt and grime included, with two lakes nearby, but you also want all the amenities Safeway and Starbucks can provide, South Lake Tahoe is the place to be.
If I had it all to do again, given my decision to let go and travel, I wouldn’t change a thing.