In a spontaneous moment last Friday, I decided to get out of the city for the weekend. I called my snowboard buddy, Rich, to see if he wanted to get out of town, too. he thought about it for 5 seconds and was all over the idea of joining me. We set a meeting place in Fairfield, right on Rt 80 where he could ditch his car and we could carpool the rest of the way.We drove straight to a nightclub show at one of the North Lake casinos, 'Eclipse' a really good Pink Floyd cover band. They did a fantastic job & we were out til 3AM.
I got up at 9 on Saturday to go mountain biking. I got to meet fellow Apres Ski Club members Joseph from the Virgin Islands and hi friend Jen. You can see us relaxing together on the 'big chair' at the Squaw summer festival.
Nick, the ski house manager, started off just showing me where the trail was but it turned into giving me a 90-minute Mountain Biking clinic on one of the easier trails. I was sucking wind after about two minutes on the bike, before we even got out of the King Beach Neighborhood. Something was wrong & I couldn't figure out why, until I remembered that I was at 6,300' altitude & my lungs had not dealt with this altitude since the end of the ski season. Once the hard pedaling was over, the ride was great. The trail was challenging for me, learning how to really use my modern mounting bike on rocky, dusty, muddy trails and finally getting dust and mud, getting some 'mountain' into my mountain bike.
The Ride was exhausting & I called it quits for the day at 2PM, opting to spend the rest of the afternoon at a music & beer festival at Squaw Valley.
The festival lasted until about 8PM, so we hit the Biltmore Casino for a great $5.95 gambler-subsidized Prime Rib dinner.. I have been missing these since the end of ski season. THe heavy dinner, however, killed the rest of the night for us; we headed back to the house, too tired to have any more fun that day.
Sunday was great, with a less taxing pavement-only bikeride along the lakeshore. The bike still has dust and mud on it, so its got some credibility now.
I stopped at a beach for a while and saw these cool granite slab cutouts that together compose a 3-D representation of Lake Tahoe.
We hit the Squaw festival again Sunday afternoon and headed home around 5, spotting in 'Old Sacramento' What a treat this was. Sacramento has a 4-square block area long the river that is a 'wild wild west' frontier town. The buildings are the genuine article, the touristy shops that now inhabit them are not. We got $5 burger plates at a cool 'old west' saloon restaurant.
It sounds rather touristy - but it is definitely a cool thing to see with 2x8 boards for sidewalks and riverboats, like mississippi river boats along side this 'old west' town within Sacramento.
I finally got back at 10PM and called it a good weekend.
