The plan was to head to Homewood to ride if it snowed at least 3" overnight. It snowed about 1. Since our passes to Sugarbowl are only good M-F we needed to find something else to do with ourselves. And so we set out onto 89, away from, rather than towards, all the crowds from the Bay congesting the roads near the ski resorts.
The houses went from beautiful amber colored vacation homes to well lived in small homes and trailers quickly. Going in and out of Tahoe National Forest we started the loop that goes from Truckee out 89 to Sierraville, West to Nevada City and comes back around on I-80. The elevation ranged from over 8,000 ft where it was snowing, down below 2,000 ft where it was raining or misty and the granite cliffs and moss reminded me of British Columbia. Several hours in, after finding one little town where everything was closed, we decided to stop for a little cocoa in North San Juan. Unfortunately the hope of finding an isolated Puerto Rican community in rural California didn't pan out. We walked into Yuki's Fountain, not quite sure what to expect, with the window advertising breakfast, homemade pastries and oriental cuisine. We sat at the counter, with local eating omelettes and hash browns to one side and teriyaki yakisoba to the other. Yaki'd Fountain is owned by a Japanese woman, astounding in this town of under 600 people. The first page of the menu was full of traditional American favorites and the second was full of "oriental" selections. Behind us on the wall was a hand painted family tree with photos of at least 50 people pasted on it. And I thought I lived in a small town.
This was a great adventure after more than 5 weeks rehabbing a knee injury. But thankfully it's snowing more now, I'm working on getting back on a board and things are looking up. Apologies for the lack of posts but sitting at home icing a knee isn't much to write about. Much more in the future!
P.S. I have a number of people on an email list for this blog, mostly from when I was traveling. If you receive this post as an email and would like to stay on the email list, just forward this to me, otherwise I'll just take you off, since I'd hate to bother you with my snowy tales.
