Day IX

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Reece: For once we were able to sleep in a little bit in the tent, finally both rising at around 11:30 am. We had no real plan for the day, besides doing some laundry and eventually heading towards Yosemite. For lunch we cooked the rest of the soup we had bought. I played the mandolin for a bit longer and then we eventually packed up and left the campsite at around 3:00. We drove into Tahoe City, a small town lined with outdoor stores and coffee shops with wooden facades, and made our way to the coin-op laundromat right next to the Safeway. We didn’t even have to use the change machine because I had managed to turn fifty cents that I had in my pocket at a Nevada gas station into almost three dollars in quarters on a slot machine. We had thirty-five minutes to scope out a wi-fi location and snap off a few photos over the lake. After doing just that we headed back to the laundromat and switched it over to the dry cycle. On our way out, heading back to the car, we witnessed an older woman back her car into another parked car. We both felt terribly, but there was nothing we could do, and it certainly wasn’t our fault. Or so we thought. Caitlin was nice enough to say she felt sorry for the woman, who responded, “I was looking at your cute cowboy hat!” Needless to say, I felt pretty proud to be with a girl that turned heads to such a degree that it caused car accidents.

We then headed to the cyber café we had found on our previous walk, got some coffee and bared down on the blog work we wanted to finish. The café was nice, having a real homey feeling, allowing us to sit on a couch and put our feet up on a wicker coffee table. Caitlin took over the technical aspects of updating the blog and loading the photos, and as I got tired I went to fold and bring back the dry laundry. Unfortunately, this didn’t wake me up as I had hoped it would. Eventually we were thrown out of the coffee shop at around quarter to six, having only made marginal progress on the blog due to a relatively slow connection speed. We were both tired and a bit sluggish. It wasn’t hard to consign ourselves to another night in beautiful Lake Tahoe.

We took the time to check out a few other campgrounds farther south down the lake, but nothing caught our eye. Everything was more expensive than the William Kent campground, too. So, we went to a general store and got some more soup, cheese and bread for dinner. We originally wanted to leave Tahoe because the weather was calling for snow and rain that night. Yet, driving around the lake, it was cool and a little windy, but the sky looked anything but threatening. We came back to the campground and registered for another night in another campsite. Caitlin took on the chore of setting up camp while I rummaged around for firewood and kindling and got the fire started. Just as night was beginning to fall, the first snowflakes began to appear. Snow on Memorial Day. This was a first for the both of us. Cooking dinner and cozying up to the fire, we took our time drinking a few beers and eventually turned in for the night, not knowing what kind of weather or conditions the morning would hold for us. All we knew is that we wanted to be in Yosemite by the end of the day.

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