Lake Tahoe/Reno Trip
We (my lovely wife and I) just returned from a trip to Lake Tahoe and Reno last week. The purpose of the trip was to attend the US Committee on Irrigation and Drainage (USCID) Irrigation District Specialty Conference, but we took a few days before to take in Lake Tahoe and do some sightseeing.
Strangely, the best part of the trip was the driving. We put nearly 1600 miles on the pickup during the trip and the driving conditions were perfect – good roads, sparse traffic and mostly overcast skies with occasional gentle rains. When it was clear, there were puffy white clouds casting shadows on the deserts and mountains making them seem alive. The colors were subtle, pleasing, calming. We went up on the California side along the “backside” of Yosemite where the mountains still had snow on them and returned on the Nevada side with the wide-open deserts where the surrounding mountains had eroded leaving large deltas. I expected the return trip to be long and boring, but it turned out to be glorious with glimpses of the Sierras to the west and multiple mountain ranges to the south and east that all seemed to have slightly different colors and shadows.
It also was a great time to spend with Cindy. We had hours to just chat and enjoy each other’s company. When we weren’t talking, we were entertained, encouraged and convicted by Mark Driscoll sermons that we had downloaded from his church’s site. Yep, we listened to sermons voluntarily.
Lake Tahoe was beautiful. The thing I noticed was that in addition to the blue color, there was none of the flotsam and jetsam that you normally see on other lakes. The whole area (outside of the towns) seemed cleaner than most of the other lakes I’m familiar with. It reminded me of the lakes in Glacier National Park. We took a paddleboat cruise around the lake over to Emerald Bay and took in the sights from the lake outward.
