Darlene relented to dipping into cold water again and joined me for a dive at Breakwater Cove in Monterey to refresh our scuba skills ahead of our upcoming trip. 54 degrees at the bottom of the dive – warm for Monterey!
Tag: California
Tahoe Summer Days
Darlene and I spent a couple weeks in late June and early July at the Tahoe house taking care of a bunch of house maintenance, including roof repair, clearing newly fallen branches and pine needles, moving the bear box to accommodate a widening of the driveway, etc. We took some time off from all that to go climb to the top of a very windy Mt. Rose (elev. 10,785 ft.), do some mountain biking and hike up the Five Lakes trail near Palisades/Alpine Meadows.
We also had another bear visitor while up working on the roof:
Among the Giant Sequoias
Darlene and I loaded up the van and the cats and headed out this past week for a short adventure. First stop was to overnight under some dark skies in the San Benito mountains for a potential meteor storm from Tau Herculids. (There was a decent meteor shower, but no full-on storm.) We then spent the next five days in and around Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park, hiking among the magnificent giant sequoia trees, checking out Kings Canyon and exploring the Sequoia National Forest between the two national parks. We also attempted an extended mountain bike ride from Buck Rock to Lookout Peak but had to abort due to a failure / total destruction of my rear hub – resulting in a long bike walk back.

Ski Weekends at Homewood
These are pictures and videos from several more ski weekends at Homewood in Tahoe with Troy, Resi, Aiden and Darlene over February and March.
Tahoe Ski Week
Darlene and I joined Bill, Stan and Jon for our yearly ski vacation week, this time in Tahoe in early March. We hit up Northstar and Palisades Tahoe during the week, with lots of board gaming in between of course. On Saturday, Stan and Jon joined us at Homewood with Troy and Aiden to enjoy a bit of new snow.

And a little VR demo-ing:
A High Speed Tour of the Tahoe Ski Areas
I took off in an F/A-18E jet from Truckee airport and visited most of the Tahoe area ski resorts in 12 minutes or less:
Gamers Gone Skiing

We got our gaming group together in Tahoe in early February for a few days of skiing and board gaming. Geof and Nacho joined me on the slopes at Tahoe Palisades while Jennifer, Adriana, Laurie and Richard checked out the lake and old town Truckee – and Laurie got in an afternoon at Northstar.
We had exploding potions in Quacks of Quedlinburg, color confusion in Hues and Cues, pushed our luck in Diamant, placed our bets in Wits & Wagers, rolled for the top in Mountain Goats, intercepted secret codes in Decrypto, managed our tricks in both The Crew and Instinct, swam with sharks in Survive: Escape from Atlantis!, built up a map of cities and roads in Carcassonne, dodged avalanches in Slide 5, and laid out our “stained glass” dice windows in Sagrada.
Paddling Elkhorn Slough
While Darlene was out here visiting for a few days from Wisconsin, ;-) we took the kayak out for a late morning paddle in Elkhorn Slough. And of course we saw the usual array of sea lions, sea otters, pelicans, etc:

















