William Reardon’s Blog

Watching TV, CNN is reporting on the bad weather hitting California right now. They’re reporting live on the rain in LA & the snow in Tahoe. In other words, where I live & where I spent this weekend. Utter craziness. In LA, they are reporting about a house that slide down the mountain along Laurel Canyon Blvd, I road I regularly take when visiting Brandon.

In Tahoe, they are saying it’s the worst storm to hit the area since 1916. Of course, that’s the weekend I happen to head that way with Neb & Misa. Heading up on Friday, we thought we had lucked out as both traffic and weather light. We zipped up 50, the key road between the Bay Area & Tahoe. “Fools!”, we thought, “Scared off too easily by the threat of a storm, they have surrendered the mountain to us!”

Boldly the next morning we headed off to Sierra. But the mountain had decided it was not to be. For over night, two feet of snow had fallen, closing down 50. Rebuffed but indomitable, we decided to head to Heavenly, a resort closer to our hotel.

A few hours on the mountain was really all we could bear. Gusting winds that would put to Chicago to shame. Snowfall rivaling a shaken snow globe. Zero visibility. Not zero in what I had previously considered it be, but literally zero. When things were good you could see 20 or 30 feet, just barely enough to move a bit forward.

Latter that day we found that not just 50 was closed down, but all three routes that crossed through the Sierra’s (including I-80), meaning we were snowbound in Tahoe. Not good since Lisa & I had to be at work on Monday. (On up shot, we did find a great buffet that night at Harrahs.)

We had hoped to ski on Sunday as well, but we found out first thing that while 50 was closed, I-80 was open. We decided to get out while the gettin’ was good. We had to do a long loop around, heading north-east (instead of south-west), into Carson City, through Reno and over to 80.

We got back a little while ago and I’m now resting comfortable in Sunnyvale. Oddly, on first arriving in LA, back from the holidays in the midwest, I had thought I was going to miss the weather a little bit.

Apparently not.

UPDATE: Photo fixed (thanks Ben). Also, forgot to mention: I stealthfully snagged an entire box giant slim jim’s from the slim jim display tent at Heavenly. Ben & Lisa thought it was stealing, but how can you steal something that’s free?

At the very least, I would think they would be happy about it. Those slim jims could have provided a few critical days of sustenance for me before having to turn to alternative food sources had the snow trapped us in the car over Donner’s Pass, if you did my drift… and apparently my stolen goods wheren’t too taboo to snack on during the drive home.

But then who can resist a slim jim!?

SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2005 at 10:52 pm and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.