Road trip!

Apparently, everything in my life is on fast-forward all of a sudden.

One minute, I'm filling my friend Sherri in on my new job, and a few hours later, she's calling me to invite me on a short little trip to Lake Tahoe. She was planning to drive up yesterday to drop her daughter off at camp, and planned to stay the night in the area, in order to avoid the hideous traffic out of the region on Sunday afternoons/evenings. And since I'd just told her I was... uh... NOT WORKING at the moment (I still can't get used to that!)... she thought I should go.

So I did!

We hit the road at 0-dark-hundred (as my young friend Sierra would say) yesterday, and made it up there in about four hours (after an interesting detour in some abandoned business park in a Sacramento suburb, looking for a place where I could pee)... drove around the lake a bit, had lunch, found a place for Sherri and me to stay, then dropped her daughter Anais off.

Sher and I then headed back to the Driftwood Lodge -- which sounds like something charming and rustic, but is really a bit old and shabby... though it was clean, had comfy beds, a nice pool, excellent water pressure in the shower and a fantastic location, right near tons of stuff, so what else do you need?? -- and spent some time cooling off in the pool. It's been very hot in the Bay Area of late, especially where Sherri lives, and was mighty hot and muggy in the mountains, so a little pool time was restorative.

We were both hankering for a yummy dinner -- she, because of a very stressful few days at work, and me, because I haven't really had a chance to celebrate my new job yet. We found a good place that we could walk to, so we went all out. Prime rib, salmon, and a yummy bottle of wine (a Kenwood Pinot Noir, in case you were wondering... YUM.). Dinner was excellent

We then thought it might be funny to head to one of the big hotel-casinos for a cocktail, if we could find a cheesy lounge...(okay, that was probably my idea, knowing me... but Sherri was game...)...

Well, we found a bar next to the casino that was cheesy-lame as opposed to cheesy-funny, and the bartender made us some lame cosmos, so we left after that. We headed back home today, after picking Anais up in the morning, because.... well, it's a long story, but suffice it to say that the camp was not all it should have been and the supervision was non-existent and she wasn't comfortable.

It was great fun. I wasn't expecting to have time -- and I definitely don't have the money -- to go anywhere this week, during this unexpected vacation -- so it was just a fabulous little getaway.

And tomorrow is the "official" work farewell, where I expect to shed more dorky tears, but you've come to expect that by now, yes?