Lake Tahoe

Yay! We made it. Whenever we have so many moving parts to a trip (four total flights from two different initial locations) I always worry that one of us will get stranded somewhere. Not this time. Hooray! Jackson picked me up at the airport and whisked me to our hotel for the evening. It was a super nice place just outside of Reno. We slept like babies since it was so late our time. When we woke up we were surprised to see our view of the mountains. (Landing at night you have no idea what things will look like in the morning!) It was beautiful! 

The surprise view

We forced ourselves out of bed and started our day by heading down to Lake Tahoe. We were amazed at how beautiful the drive was from Reno to Tahoe. We had to make a quick stop on the Nevada side of the lake to get my Mom a Hard Rock Cafe pin. You know, the essential of each trip whose destination has a cafe!

4th of July pin since that's where we'll be watching the fireworks this year

We left the Nevada side and found the California side of Tahoe to be much nicer. Something about all of the casinos on the Vegas side just made it very smokey a little more rundown feeling. Crossing over to California was a breath of fresh air, literally.

My handsome lunch date

We found a little Mexican place to have lunch and enjoyed dining on their patio. The weather is certainly warm here but without the humidity it just feels really good. We left lunch and explored the area a little more before setting out to go stand up paddleboarding. I was all excited about having our GoPro for this adventure when Jackson reminded me that if I dropped the camera it wouldn't float. Whoops. That made me come up with this plan...

I tied a shoestring to my life jacket and hooked it to the camera's waterproof case

Genius if you ask me. Jackson was less impressed when he had to untie all of my knots at the end due to my lack of fingernails. Whoops.

The view from my board

Anyway, the place we chose ended up being really shallow so when we fell off we could generally just stand right back up. I didn't really need my brilliant invention after all. Oh well. The shallow water made staying up on the board more difficult and I actually fell off once. I was so sad. Jackson fell off more than he stayed on. My only complaint about the area was that people on the boardwalk heckled the paddleboarders if they fell down. It is really easy to be over there, jerks. You try it in this choppy, shallow water. End of rant.

Jackson's adventures in fall-down paddleboarding

We had the board for 1.5 hours so I took a break for a bit and just soaked in the sights and sounds. Then Jackson joined me for a bit.

Resting on the job

This took skill ;)

After we'd had enough of the paddleboarding we got back in the car to head to our next stop: Rancho Cordova, CA. It was just a good stopping point between Tahoe and King's Canyon National Park for us. We had dinner at In-n-Out which is like a must when you're in the Cali/Nevada area (I actually hate the place and had forgotten, but Jackson enjoyed his so that's good!). Being the old folks that we now both are, we went to bed pretty early California time so that we could head out for the National Park the next morning bright and early.