Tahoe in January

For the last weekend in January, we planned a trip to Tahoe with 3 other families -- the Lins, the Shens, and the Yaus. We ended up booking a house in Kings Beach about a 10 min drive to Tahoe. The house had 4 bedrooms and 4 full bathrooms, having a bathroom for each family was nice. We took the bunk room, which had two sets of twin-over-full bunk beds. There was also enough air mattresses to go around that noone had to sleep on the actual floor or on a couch.

The house was a two-story, so there was a flight of stairs that the kids, especially the boys, couldn't get enough of. Although in the below photo, there are more girls.

Saturday morning it took a while for people to get gear and tickets and head over to the Highlands gondola since the main gondola already had a long line. So we didn't all get on the mountain until mid-morning. Hansel and I with Mathis in tow tried to show Beck some moves on a little incline by the Snowboard school while Maile skied with Al, Hannah, and Zachary. We were on the mountain less than an hour when we figured we needed to head back down to get our car from 2-hr parking.

All of us except Al, Stew, Hannah, and Maile headed back to the house for lunch and naps. Al ran into a friend who was now a ski instructor and got in a few runs with him and some helpful tips. For dinner we had pasta and pizza, and the kids helped make cookies for dessert.

We had brought some loops that is meant to be used with a loom, but I didn't realize the box did not include the loom. Maile and Hannah had strung all the loops together, and Hansel helped string the loops across the bunk room. We told the kids to pretend they were lasers and to not touch them or an alarm would go off.

There was also lots of movie watching and iPad/iPhone playing with some trains mixed in.

Sunday morning the Yaus, Hansel, and Maile headed out first. They had planned to return to pack up the cars and leave from the house. But after Leilani had a driving scare, they figured it would be easier if those that were still at the house just put the Yaus stuff, which was already packed, in our van and meet them at Northstar. Doing that and the minimal cleaning that was required actually took the rest of us a while. The clean-up stuff made me appreciate our timeshare, where we don't have to clean anything (can we say spoiled?).