We just got back this morning (well 12:30am) from a three day trip to Tahoe, CA with the Folks.

We left on Friday morning, to make the 250 mile trip into the mountains, and the rain was heavy as we left Los Gatos.  This was snow in the mountains, and it is believed that 2ft dropped over night the night before we set off.  This was 100% believable – it took us 10.5 hours to make that trip (including 2 hours of stop off for lunch and refuelling etc.

Tahoe is a beautiful place that we are very fortunate to have seen this weekend, even more so that we were able to stay in Jason’s parents place that is right on the lake – in fact their back garden reaches down to a small beach on the shore of the lake.

En-route, we witnessed these massive machines that simply ran along the sides of the road with huge screw like teeth on the front that simply ATE their way into the banks of snow and then blew it out of the way.  These beasts would leave a 6 to 10 foot wall of snow down the side of the carriageway where they had cut into the bank.  There were some homes along the roads that quite simply were inaccessible to their owners since there would be a sizable wall of snow in their driveway.  It was actually such that when driving through the towns, you could actually NOT see the shops from the road since the wall of snow prevented visibility of the stores.

We will post some photos as soon as we get them off the cameras.

Roy and Daisy’s garden (Jason’s parents) back garden was so full of snow that the ground floor bedroom that we stayed in was actually UNDER the level of the snow – i.e. open the curtains and we just started at a 9ft snow drift !!!!

Jason (with a little help from Simon) dug out a 3foot wide and 4 / 5 foot deep track down the garden so that the kids could sledge down the small slope in the garden.  We have some video footage that we will post as Oliver LOVED sledging – to the point that he screamed when he stopped moving on the disks.

We really would like to head back when the boys are a little older so we can all learn to ski / snow board.

We came back early (we were due to stay all day today as well) because on Saturday night, the boys got about 3 hours sleep – Elliot was panicked about something and Olly just wouldn’t sleep.  Thankfully the both got a good sleep last night and will doubtlessly be getting an early night tonight as well.