i’ve been wanting to check out the skiing in tahoe for years and it happened to all work out this year.  talks began last february at the first annual president’s day weekend ski trip in whistler with brad, cecilia, wei-jean, jason and friends.   with wei and jason’s move to san fran over the summer we decided tahoe would be the location in 08. 

another added benefit this year…  a getaway for valentine’s day falling the same weekend.  ok so the two holidays are generally overlapping but i’d like to think that it was even more exciting getting on a plane for a fun weekend ski trip to get spoiled this year.  half the crowd missed out this year; wei had an opportunity to go to china for a contract position (since jason is getting deployed soon for 6 months- i think); russ, brian and travis were all tied to their jobs and couldn’t take off… 

we had 3 days of sunny skiing, each day on a different mountain (tahoe has a total of 12 ski resorts).  it hadn’t snowed for awhile so the snow was less than stellar, but after spending the last few months in seattle surrounded by gray cloudy skies i was ecstatic about the sunshine all weekend.  friday we hit up squaw valley, where bradley enjoyed a few long spills down the mountain.  with the hard packed snow they had groomed a few steep blacks so if you caught an edge you were sliding down the entire slope.  we enjoyed apres ski in the sunshine (they had cups made from corn) and headed back to the townhouse in tahoe city for a feast of steak and twice baked potatoes.  yumm!  friday night brad, jason and cec headed to the casinos on the CA/NV stateline for some craps.  the casino gods didn’t treat them too nice on their first night out, but they ended up making most of it back throughout the weekend… :)  since i was still fighting off the last of my cold, mark and i took it easy friday night.

 

saturday we again stayed in the north end of the lake skiing at homewood.  they have the most amazing views of the lake from the south lot slopes.  the snow was much more soft and a majority of the skiers were coatless for most of the day because it was so warm!  that night we played mafia with a bunch of jason’s air force buddies.  it’s much harder to figure out the dynamics with people you’ve just met since most of the game is based on figuring out who’s lying about “killing the townspeople”. 

 
  

we made the 30 minute drive over to northstar on sunday.  the lines on the front side were insane, but we headed over to the back and had some nice long runs.  our final night in tahoe we made amazing tacos and headed out to pete N peter’s in tahoe city for more drinking – blue moon was the beer of choice most of the weekend.

 

mark and i had a couple hours to kill before we flew out of reno on monday, so we walked around lake tahoe for a bit and decided to drive back to the reno to check out all that is “the biggest little city in the world.”  nothing exciting besides doubling our money during the 15 minutes we hung out at harrah’s.  mark and chris have been watching reno 911 (don’t watch it… it’s ridiculously stupid!) and all the humor about reno is even more hilarious to him now since we drove through it.