The remainder of our time in South Lake Tahoe proved to be rather laid back. Both Claire and I ended up getting the fever/bug that Hudson had come down with at the beginning of our trip, so that definitely held us back a bit. Thankfully the fever only lasted about 1 to 1 1/2 days for each of us so it was relatively short-lived.
We did venture out to Virginia City one day. It's an old mining town with a plethora of tourist-trap shops and candy stores. We did go on a little mine tour in town and took the big open-car train ride in the hills. In spite of the billions of stores, we only made a few minor purchases. The kids each got a little bit of candy and Hudson ended up using his $10 from Grandpa to buy a fossilized sand dollar and a pretty blue stone of some sort from The Rock Shop.
The only other real outing that we ended up going on was a brief trip to a local beach. Guests at our Marriott are given free passes to get in so we took advantage and all of us mommies (and Grandma), Max, my brother Dave, and all of the kiddies headed down there mid-morning on Thursday. Being so used to the sand at the ocean (aka "the real beach"), I was shocked at how coarse the sand was at Tahoe and found that it actually hurt my feet a bit. Claire didn't like it, either...after a single moment of standing on it, she refused to touch it again the entire time we were there. Thank heavens for the big play structure that she was able to run and climb on.
As I said before, other than our little outings, the rest of the week remained pretty mellow. When we were in good enough shape, we put the pool and "coolest" hot tub to very, very good use. Claire absolutely loved the "wall-ah" and Hudson was a good sport, going back and forth between the cooler pool (if you call 85 degrees cool) and the hot tub with his crazy mommy. Oh - and another miracle occurred on our trip (the first being my time behind the wheel on the drive out)...Max actually got in the pool with us. Unlike my guppy children and myself, he's never been a huge fan of going swimming, especially in public (too crowded & all...can you blame him?). It was so much fun to be out there together as a family and I know that both our kids and some of the cousins who also swam with him were thrilled to have him there.
Since we were to check out Friday morning, we spent much of Thursday afternoon doing laundry, packing, checking under furniture for Legos, doing more laundry, etc. I always hate feeling like such a chunk of my vacation time is taken up by packing up at the end but it's a necessary evil.
In this process, I learned a very valuable secret: If you ever stay on the third floor of the Alpine building at Marriott's Timber Lodge in South Lake Tahoe, you cannot rely on the washer on the right to start when you push the button or the dryer on the right to...wait for it...actually dry your clothes. While we did have our own washer and dryer in our condo, we decided to take advantage of the guest laundry room just down the hall. I set both washers to do their job and when I went back an hour later to transfer the clothes to the dryers, I discovered that the aforementioned washer on the right had never started and wouldn't start no matter how many freaking buttons I pushed. I had to shut the thing down, power it back up, and re-set the whole cycle before it'd do what it was supposed to. So, while that washer was running, I threw the other clothes into one of the dryers, turned it on, and headed back over to our place. Another hour went by and I ran over to change the 2nd load over to the dryer. I then discovered that the first load that I had put in the dryer was warm but still almost as damp as when I had put it in there. So I tossed the second load into the same dryer with the first, set it to a higher heat setting and longer duration and once again left. When I came back from dinner over an hour later, all of the clothes were still totally wet. Warm, but wet. I think they would have been drier had I laid them all out over the dining chairs in our condo. I ended up taking all of the clothes back to our place where our very reliable in-house dryer did the job the right way in less than 45 minutes. If I had just done those two loads in our condo the first time around, all of our laundry would have been done and folded prior to our going out to dinner. Note to self: don't ever buy front-loading washer and dryer by GE.
We were up plenty early on Friday and should have been packed, showered, and ready to go by checkout time at 10:00 a.m. Not so...it was a rough morning with Hudson acting out and Claire constantly fussing and crying. Not exactly ideal conditions when trying to get things done. We finally made it out the door by about 10:30 or so and instead of heading for home, we followed my sister and her kids down the mountain in the opposite direction...
Hudson and a few of his cousins (Emma, Thomas, and Abby) playing in the sand. Thankfully, it was the coarse sand that I mentioned in a previous post and cleaned off easily.
Claire hanging out on the play structure at the beach...she was happy to run back and forth on the bridges, climb the steps, and take the occasional trip down one of the slides.
M
