Life's A Beach: Back in the swing...

It's taken me a little while, but I do believe that I'm back in the swing of "real life" again.

Vacation was awesome. Rebel and I had a great time with the whole family. And when I say "whole family" I mean it. He met them all (4 brothers, 3 sisters-in-law, 1 girlfriend, 1 sister, 1 brother-in-law, the parentals, 2 sets of aunts and uncles plus an extra aunt). I felt like I should have made a flip-book for him with names and faces so he had a shot in hell of keeping them all straight. The only person missing was granny.

But Rebel did great. He seemed to take all the intense questioning (think Spanish Inquisition) like a pro. And he still thought that hanging out with me was a good idea by the end. Success!! If that didn't chase him off (well, that and my crazy hormones this past weekend) then I think we're good to go. Which is great. Because we have some big plans on the horizon. No, no. I'm not getting married. No one panic. But they are grand plans. I'll fill you in sometime in the near future.

OK... back to vacation. And it's awesomeness.

The main reason behind going to Tahoe was that BooBoo and Graham were getting married at Heavenly. But we made it into a full week of family vacation fun. On Friday night I left work and headed to K Falls to pick up Rebel (where he's currently residing).

We traveled from there to a little town called Alturas, CA. Trust me. You're not missing much. We rolled in around 9:30pm and were on the road to Tahoe around 8am the next morning. Man, is that drive long and hot. And boring. Very, very boring. Not much to see out there, that's for sure. But before we got to Tahoe, we decided to make a pit stop in Reno and do some shopping. Well, Rebel wanted to do some shopping. I really did not want to do any shopping. But I found some nice shirts and a cute skirt. And it didn't come out of my bank account. Win/win.

After that it was off to South Lake Tahoe and our low-budget accommodations at Super 8. It actually wasn't that bad, I suppose. The place was clean. It was right in the heart of the action. But the downsides were the AC was spotty, our view was interesting (mostly consisted of the roof of the adjacent building), and the bed was really hard. My hips weren't super happy after a few days.

Saturday night was just spent meeting up with folks and seeing how everyone else's digs looked (most were way better).

On Sunday morning Rebel and I attempted to find breakfast. I say "attempted" because it was around 11am and most of the good places had a really big line. Instead we ended up at McDonald's. Meh, can't win them all I suppose. Then we headed to the beach and bought tickets on the Sternwheeler Tahoe Queen. It is a cruise that heads west across the lake, circles into Emerald Bay and then docks back at the beach again. The cruise took about 3 hours. It was great... and a cool way to see the lake.

The Tahoe Queen docking...