Mile 3492

After a couple of days at Lake Tahoe, CA/NV, it is time to move on tomorrow.  We arrived at Lake Tahoe following again the Lincoln Hwy through Reno, NV south to Carson City, NV before passing the Washoe Indian Reservation and coming through the Toiyabe National Forest to the Stateline.  Here the casinos are built right up to the State line, and Stateline Ave. separates Nevada from California even though, the town moves from one to another.  It is the typical buzzing summer (and winter) vacation town, with many restaurants, shops, hotels, resorts, casinos (on the other side), shows, horse carriage rides, and all other "Halli-Galli" a tourist town has to provide.  The ride to the other side of town is exhausting, stop and go, and I hardly see anything of the lake.
We decide to take our luck and make the next day a trip around the lake, against the clock, and surprisingly traffic is moderate for a Sunday.  The lake is just beautiful, deep blue and clear water, on average you can look down 72 ft (per Secchi disc measurement), and pretty cold.  We enjoy the scenic ride around the 72 miles of shoreline and then throw us in the Sunday afternoon buzz of the town.

Art installations along Lincoln Hwy in Carson City, NV

Today we used to run some errands, send stuff home we discovered we didn't need and to lighten our baggage, laundry, some shopping (since we have more space now) and had an easy going day.  We will leave the original Lincoln Highway now to run South to meet up with family in Los Angeles, CA. Tomorrow will be hot again, and we will be on the road again, moving South into John Steinbeck's dust bowl of California so nicely described in his books, towards the region we left 15 years ago.

Lake Tahoe, CA

Lake Tahoe, CA - Emerald Bay

Tahoe City, CA

Stateline, NV, viewing west shore (CA)

"We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination. We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us -- a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords." - Mark Twain, Roughing It (his first impression of Lake Tahoe)

“Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.” - John Muir, 1873 letter to Jeanne Carr