Camping in Tahoe

Adobe shuts down all of their North American offices during the first week of July. It’s a fantastic thing, because it’s the only time all year that you can have a week off without having to catch up after you’re back!

Nick and I had the idea to knock an item off my “30 before 30” list – specifically, the “travel somewhere last minute” item. The spirit behind that item was to book a trip as late as possible – ideally even the day before leaving! However, the more we looked, the more we realised that first week in July is popular travel week, and about three weeks out, we realised we weren’t likely to find something within our budget at the last minute.

So, we changed plans, and started checking out campsites. Specifically, our idea was to spend two days in Tahoe, two days in Yosemite, and two days in Big Sur. We were able to score our Tahoe & Yosemite campsites with minimal issues, even though it was the peak season, but Big Sur was totally booked (pic below…we really need to make it out there at some point).

I was actually okay with “only” four nights of camping, since I hadn’t been camping since I was 13, and hated it at that time (loved it as a kid, hated it as a teenager, but then again I hated most things as a teenager…).

Nick did some research and ordered us all the camping gear that we would need (maybe I will be able to get him to post about that later) and a few weeks later we were off! …after we spent about three hours playing “camping equipment tetris” and cramming the car full of stuff, anyway:

Trunk space: not the Mustang’s best feature.

The forecast for our trip was hot, hot, hot! We both loooove driving with the top down, and will usually put it down if it’s any warmer than 65F/18C, but we discovered our limit is about 113F/45C. At that point, we pulled over and put the top up and blasted the A/C.

We arrived at our campground in Tahoe around 5pm and set up camp. Our setup was pretty sweet (not pictured: picnic table and fire pit; chef Pam not included):

Behind me in the photo is something called a Bear Box, which is a metal box that you have to store all of your food and scented items in (sunscreen, bug repellant) to keep bears away. Bears have learned that they can’t get into these metal bear boxes, so they don’t try anymore. If you leave food in your car or your tent though, you’d better believe they are going to get into it, maybe even shredding your car’s back seats to get through into the trunk.

Since we arrived at camp pretty late, we didn’t have time for anything other than dinner and sleep. The next day was Canada Day, and some friends of ours had invited us to hang out with them at Lake Tahoe. We happily accepted, packed up some Canadians (beers, not people) in a cooler and spent the day celebrating in a very Canadian fashion, by jumping off a dock into a cold lake, drinking beers, boating around, and being whipped around while tubing! Lake Tahoe is really beautiful and Nick and I both really fell in love with it. We’ll be back, for sure.  

The next day, we packed up bright and early to head to Yosemite, which was about a 5 hour drive away. More to come in part 2 of this post!