2009-07 Lake Tahoe Part 2

We didn’t have much planned for Wednesday and went into town and did some shopping at Heavenly Village. A lot of people were out, but it didn’t look like a lot were buying. We went to one of our traditional vacation spots for lunch—the Hard Rock Café. We try to go the Hard Rock in any city we are in that has one.

We stopped at the South Tahoe Recreation Area to check out the beach, but didn’t go swimming, just some beach walking and photo taking. We ended the afternoon playing mini golf on the dinosaur course at Magic Carpet mini golf course. Kara had the hot putter as she had the only 2 holes in one that any of us got.

On Thursday, we got up early in order to get parking at the Emerald Bay state park. We walked a mile down the hill from the parking lot to Vikingsholm, a house built to Scandinavian design on the shores of Emerald Bay. This was the summer home of Lora Knight. It was on over 250 acres of land, with 7000 feet of shoreline and included ownership of the only island in Lake Tahoe.

The house had numerous rooms for overnight guests and entertaining, a large carriage house for automobiles, and servant’s quarters for all the house help. Our tour guide had spent 14 summers at the house as her parents were friends with Mrs. Knight, so she had a lot of inside knowledge of what had gone on at the mansion. Much of the furniture in the main house was original, and replicas had been put into some of the rooms used by the house help.

From the back of the house, we made our way up the path to the lower section of Eagle Falls. The lower section falls are about 150 feet in length, and were flowing at a high rate this time of year. We then went back down to the beach in front of Vikingsholm and Ray and Hailey waded out to cool off before heading back up the hill and back to the parking lot. We decided to go see the upper falls as it was only about 1000’ from the parking lot. These falls are only about 40’ long and not as expansive as the lower falls.

For dinner, we went to Thai One On, a local Thai food restaurant. The food was good and we enjoyed talking to the owner and hearing about other activities to consider in the area.

Friday we headed for Zephyr Cove to take a ride on the M.S. Dixie sternwheeler. The M.S. Zephyr is the largest boat currently on Lake Tahoe. It has 3 decks, with the lower two enclosed and the upper deck open. We sat in the front area of the upper deck and had great views of the lake as we crossed from the east side to the west side. We rode into emerald Bay and got to see the Vikingsholm and Eagle Falls from the lake side this time.

When we returned to Zephyr Bay, we were amazed how crowded the beach was until we figured out that a lot of people had Friday off for the 4^th of July holiday. We walked down the beach a ways and then headed back to our room and went down to the pool for the afternoon.

Friday night was spent packing up, cleaning up and preparing for our return to Minneapolis on Saturday.

We got up Saturday morning and left Tahoe Village about 8:15 and made it to the Reno airport by 9:30, checked in for our flight and put a couple of bucks into the slot machines, our only gambling for the whole trip. The kids got shooed away from the slot area as you must be 21 to gamble in Neveda.

The flight was uneventful and on time. We picked up our luggage and were on our way home before heading out for fireworks later in the evening.