Lake Taco Adventure

We were planning on getting back from L.A., moving back to Stanford, and then taking a little family camping trip when out of the blue someone from church offers to let us stay in their Lake Tahoe condo for the week! An offer like that just can't be passed up. So we postponed moving and headed straight for Lake Tahoe, or Lake Taco as Will likes to call it, with our friends the Conti-Browns.
Our accommodations were spacious enough for the two families, and located very close to a nice beach on the south shore. This beach had everything we could have asked for. A great view for the adults, pretty clean sand despite the effort of the ducks, and a playground for the boys.

They're still young enough to not know the difference between a real shovel and pail made for the beach, and a simple glass a spoon from the kitchen. They loved the sand and playing in the freezing cold water. I didn't even want to put my feet in the water, and Will was laying down in it!
The older boys were also crazy enough to get in the water. Seriously, I only saw one other kid attempt to get in the water. They had a great time with the Frisbee out there, and Peter swears that it was refreshing.
Will and Gabe always had a car in hand. A lot of tears were shed over the cars, but we managed to get them to share some of the time.
They're still buddies, actually best friends according to Will. It was cute to see how excited Will was to see Gabe every morning.
We made one hiking attempt. We hiked on the Eagle Falls Trail and didn't get too far, but found some beautiful scenery, and gave these guys a chance to throw some rocks in water.
We packed a lot of activities into our last day. We started out pretty early for a canoe ride. Well, it was mostly a ride for me since the guys did most of the paddling.
Will wasn't a huge fan of the canoe ride, but enjoyed dipping (numbing) his feet in the water. We tied the two canoes together for more stability and fun. It also allowed Peter the chance to take another dive into the lake. He said the middle of the lake was more numbing than refreshing.
Then we drove around the lake up north to take a gondola ride at the Northstar Resort.
It turned out to be six gondola rides total. In two of them we were safely caged on all sides, but the last one was just an open seat! And we took our two year-old boys! I think they could sense our anxiety as we firmly held them down on the seat because they didn't try to fight it.
We saw a view of Lake Tahoe from one of the lifts, and enjoyed watching the mountain bikers take on the trails. I had no idea ski resorts catered to mountain bikers in the summer. There was a ton of bikers at Northstar that day.
Here's the view from another side of the mountain. It was great up there. In some places it was so quiet all you could hear was the wind.

The very last thing we did on our trip was play some great rounds of tether ball.