Lake Tahoe
The day after graduation was spent casually around Palo Alto, with breakfast at Hobees, a requisite trip to IKEA (the nearest one to our home in NC is 4 hours away), and a lovely dinner in downtown Palo Alto with Menaka (remember, Menaka did her undergrad at UNC and they overlapped for 2 years).
On Tuesday the four of us left for Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe is the extraordinarily popular destination out here, located 4 to 5 hours from the Bay Area and on the border with Nevada.
Indeed, the state border runs right through the lake, so giant casinos and resort hotels are perched quite literally right on the border. If you are like my family, Its the sort of border you stare at with a tinge of disappointment; a blight upon this pristine reserve. Lake Tahoe is a major winter destination for Stanford students, as nearly every undergraduate dorm organizes ski trips to Heavenly, the big ski resort in South Lake Tahoe. Yes, Stanford dollars are used to have students hit the slopes.
Being the lame studious pupil I am, I never made it out during the winter, but I didn’t feel I missed much because one doesn’t develop a baked in affinity for skiing when growing up in Austin, TX.
Anyway, we were quite excited. We stayed in South Lake Tahoe at a nice little hotel run by, you might have guessed, a nice Gujarati family. Yeah, that’s how we roll. It was cloudy and threatening to rain that day, but we trekked up part of Eagle Falls before returning to town for some pizza.
Why bother with the chain pizza places on the Nevada side when you’ve got the charming — and delicious — Lake Tahoe Pizza Company right next door? Some of the best pizza I’ve had in California.
The next morning we headed up through the state parks that line Lake Tahoe for the Cascade Falls hike. What’s interesting is that unlike Yosemite just to the south run by the National Parks Service, a jumble of state and federal agencies have jurisdiction over the variety of trails, parks, and preserves surrounding the lake. The hike was perfect for the whole group — great views, relatively short, varied landscape, and a wonderfully diverse trail end where the water forms an active rapids area before plunging over the side of the mountain.
this is the best photo of the trip — kudos to Sapana for taking it*
Next we walked down to Vikingsholm, an authentic Scandinavian castle/villa in the picturesque Emerald Bay. It’s supposedly one of the finest examples of this architecture in North America.
We somehow brought along enough food to survive for two weeks, so we had lunch back at the hotel. A lot of fresh fruit. I think the plums were conspiring against us, because it promptly knocked me out for 2 hours. Weird. Nonetheless, we ventured back for a short hike at Rubicon Point (where the deepest part of the lake is) then watched the sunset. Dinner that evening was at a unassuming Thai place just across from the hotel — where once again the food was excellent. So many vegetarian options that we were stumped (for once) what to order.
We headed out the next day and made it back to Palo Alto in surprisingly good time. Finally good to have real internet. That evening we had our fill at the ever reliable Chaat Paradise in Mountain View, then the three of us caught a late night showing of Star Trek — what a terrific film. I was always more of a Star Wars guy growing up, but seeing this reboot of the Star Trek franchise was a delight.
*another great photo Sapana happened to take was of the American flag at Red Rocks Canyon outside Las Vegas.