Shortly after Christmas, we packed up and embarked on our four hour journey from Sebastopol to North Lake Tahoe. Dad had brought six walkie-talkies with us so there was constant chattrt on the way between our carpool along with playing music to each other to guess the songs (which didn't get old at all...). We stayed in a beautiful log cabin near North Star, a ski resort. Although, when Averi, my aunty, booked the cabin which could bed 15, she didn't realise that that included six people on triple bunk beds! The Log Cabin was open plan (as you'd expect from the States) with a hot tub- luxury after a hard day's snowboarding.
Scott, my uncle, is a keen skier and bought a season pass so was on the mountain every day. For the rest of us, however, it was $170/ day (hire + ski pass at peak time) so we only skiied for a couple of days.
The three keen beans, Ian, my brother, James and I all went snowboarding on the first day. James and I had never snowboarded before so had pretty much spent $170 to fall over a lot and slide down the mountain on our bums! After a while, we were carving and James even got a few jumps in!
NorthStar was an absolutely fantastically maintained ski resort with tens of routes on both sides of the mountain and plenty of pseudo off-piste bits to explore too. There are loads of café's and shops (which we needed as neither Ian nor I had bought waterproofs on a skiing holiday- doh!) in the ski village and was a great place to meet for lunch and drinks.
On the second day, we had a fuller group, including my parents. Unbeknown to me, my mother is not the most confident woman with a pair of long slidey sticks attached to her feet on a mountain (which made for great entertainment) and I got them to go up the quick ski lift to a higher point which required a steep ski down to the rendezvous point... As I'm sure you can imagine, she was not best pleased. Check the video out of her top notch skiing (no slow motion effect used)...
Most of us took a break from skiing the next day (a surprising physically exhausting sport) and walked down to the lake which is utterly breath-taking. Snow completely replaced sand by the lake and the water was such a beautiful deep blue- you could just stare out into the distance for hours. There wasn't much going on in the town we were staying in so home entertainment was required, luckily, our American counterparts had thought ahead and brought a Wii and some boardgames (which turned very heated after a few drinks- namely Articulate).
Another day's break was needed (more for finance reasons than physical) and we took a trip to Penn Valley where my American cousin, Sean, his wife, Rebecca live. My aunt Marion was also visiting from LA. We soon discovered that Sean owned a gun (22 Rifle) which got James VERY excited.. Initially, he had high hopes of shooting some deer but soon realised this wasn't likely (mainly due to licenses etc.) so settled for going to a 'shooting range'.
Now.. We expected the shooting range to be some kind of establishment where you pay for entry, they check your gun, issue ear protection, targets and separate booths... How wrong we were- we just pulled in to a car park in the countryside! There were tens of cars all parked up with their boots open and guns laid out on the floor. Not just air rifles either, there were sniper rifles, AR 15's (Assault Rifle), hand guns and more. Shaun had a 22 rifle which was fun to play with and you didn't need ear protection... the other guns however were deafening. James soon chatted up one of the chaps nearby who had a whole arsenal of guns and ammo (in preparation for gun law changes) and had a go on his hand gun, AR 15 and some other lethal weapons and boy were they loud. Eventually, we all encroached on this poor bloke and shot some VERY powerful guns in a VERY unguarded area...
After about 20 minutes, we heard a voice shout 'CLEAR!', everyone disarmed their guns and proceeded to walk out into the shooting range to replace their targets with new melons, bottles, pillows and whatever else they had lying around. Ian and James, of course wanted to go out there while mum and I were worried about some rouge gunman getting bored of waiting and continuing his session... All was fine of course. Then my Dad had a go. His first gun choice was the AR 15, the lovely chap explained the procedure to him then let him loose. Next thing we hear is 'SHIT THAT'S LOUD'- he wasn't wearing ear plugs.... Dad has all the fun- the next gun he had a go with was a sniper rifle with a sight. Again, the guy chatted him through the procedure. Next this we hear is 'OUCH!' as he got smacked in the eye with the sight on the rebound and had a lovely cut and bruise to show for it.
My brother and I desperately wanted to do a third day's skiing but couldn't afford it, so sold two days of hard labour to our parents in return for a third and final day's ski pass- worth it!.