Tahoe

This past weekend Rachel and I traveled to Lake Tahoe to celebrate her grandfather's 90th birthday AND his 65th wedding anniversary to Rachel's grandmother. We got into town a day earlier than everyone and had fun zipping around the country side in my fun red rental car:

When we got to the time share that we were staying at I promptly passed out, as for every day of the past week I had gotten maybe 4 hours of sleep. We then headed into downtown South Lake Tahoe and enjoyed a delicious meal and watched the Avengers for the second time (note: still freakin' awesome!).

Since I was only in town until Sunday afternoon we needed to pack as much fun into our days as possible. In this case it meant lots of hiking up picturesque trails where the views were constantly breath taking and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. One note, however, is that apparently Nevada/California don't really mark their trails appropriately or maintain them well, as we were often backtracking to find the place that the ACTUAL trail wanted us to go on, including once in our car where a single lane path along a cliff's edge was apparently supposed to be a two way path to the parking lot. Awkward.

We also went on a cruise on Saturday night where I got to spend time with Shirley and Jack. They're a fun couple to hang around, although Jack can definitely be a card shark when he wants to be. They also probably engaged in the cutest moment ever when they got an entire song to themselves towards the end of the cruise.

We ended our trip with another hike on Sunday morning, and then I drove back to the airport through the local national park, which offered sweeping vista after sweeping vista. Beautiful country, if a bit steep and winding. Would be great for biking, however...

Anyway, here are some of the pictures that I took while hiking. Enjoy!

The bottom couple are from our cruise- it was a paddle boat!

Christmas 2010, part 2

*EDIT*

I didn't actually mean to post this today... I set this one up to post automatically on Saturday and must have forgotten about it. For those of my readers who don't know, my Oma passed away this past Sunday. I guess that makes the fun we had in the post below a bit more special seeing as it was her last Christmas with us. There will be some commemorative posting later, but for now let's take a look at the good times.

The cousins could only stay with us for a couple of days, leaving on the Thursday after Christmas. Before then we managed to do a few fun things, including a trip to the Corning Museum of Glass. The CMoG as I'll be calling it is a pretty cool museum, showing off a lot of glass science and history right next to the place where they invented fiber optics and CorningWare. Here are some photos from our outing:

On our last night we had Fasekigla (oy... is that how you spell it?) and my dad made stuffed peppers. Yum!

My cousins were all scheduled to leave by Thursday but my Uncle was unfortunately not able to get a seat on his flight. So we decided to make the best of it and went on a mini wine tour, hitting up Bully Hill, Dr. Franz Konstantin, Heron Hill and Ithaca Beer Co. Here's some pics of beautiful Finger Lakes country with some Herzl clan members thrown in.