Skipping Town

Saturday morning, we set out for Lake Tahoe—our first trip of the season. Tahoe is my very favorite place in NorCal—a place I can actually imagine us returning to even when we’re living back East one day. We were very excited to introduce Lucia to the lake and the mountains and pines surrounding it. And to snow, it turns out—the Sierras are still snow-covered, and hard-packed snow covered the forest floor by the side of the highway as we inched up in altitude. The temperature was pleasant—high sixties, low seventies—but the snow seems to be sticking around for a while. We arrived in late morning and went straight to King’s Beach, our favorite part of the lake. We ate the sandwiches we’d packed and then sat for a while on a blanket in a shady spot under a tree, just taking it all in and enjoying the alpine peacefulness. Around noon, we drove to Incline Village, Nevada, and checked into the Hyatt—a luxurious resort with a private beach and fabulous swimming facilities. After hauling our ...

There was a baby in our nursery this weekend, and a baby in the car seat we now have installed in our car. There was a baby crawling on our floors and taking a bath in our tub. We heard a baby crying during the night, and giggling during the day. Thanks to Michelle and Tessa’s visit, we’ve seen first-hand how our house looks (and sounds) with a baby in it. We had a lovely visit; we went to the farmer’s market and the pool, and on Saturday we drove to Lake Tahoe, where we met up with Beth, Nate, and their babies—a whole crew of children. We sat on the beach (the lake is back to being unswimmably cold), ate lunch on a blanket on the sand, and swam in the pool at the Hyatt where Beth and Nate were staying. After so many hours of birth- and baby-related classes, this weekend proved to be the “observation” portion of our training for parents-to-be. It’s nice that our observation subjects were so cute, and so fun to be with. It was pretty cute having Tessa explore the dustiest corners of our...

Andrew’s sister, Katherine, and her boyfriend, Patrick, visited us from Florida this weekend, and we did our best to show them the best NorCal has to offer. When Katherine visited us a couple of years ago, it rained the entire time she was here—it was the most rain we’d ever seen before, or have seen since. Fortunately, the weather cooperated this time, refraining from both rain and the 100s. Friday, we took a day trip to Tahoe, where we all swam in the lake and had a picnic lunch on the sand. The afternoon grew windy, and there were kite surfers in the water, some of them becoming airborne for several seconds at a time. Before heading down the mountain we showed Katherine and Patrick around the Cal Neva. Andrew and I provided our usual contribution to its upkeep and bankruptcy proceedings via the Lucky Duck, Triple 7s, and Wheel of Fortune quarter slots, while Patrick had some ridiculously good luck, at one point winning sixty quarters with his first spin. Belly in Tahoe Katherine and...

This weekend marked our third annual trip to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Though we were excited about the trip, we were also somewhat taken aback that this is our third summer in California—doing something once or twice seems somehow less “permanent” than being around for an annual festival for the third year in a row. We also calculated that this was our sixth trip to Lake Tahoe. Our claims of not really living here grow flimsier by the day. Anyway, we had a fabulous weekend. We got to the lake before lunch on Saturday and spread out on the beach, with our books and a cooler of lunch. It was pleasant in the sun, but soon grew hot, and we did something we hadn’t done in all our previous five trips: we swam in the lake. And it was amazing—cold, but not numbingly so like the other times we’d attempted it. Being pregnant, I am generally uncomfortably warm all the time, and the water felt fabulous. I stayed in far longer than shivering, non-pregnant Andrew. The lake is the ideal...