Day 1 Mon Jan 23. MEL – LAX – SMF – South Lake Tahoe (hopefully)

Be careful what you wish for …

I’m often complaining with these trips about lack of fresh snow in the area I happen to be heading for – so why should I now be surprised that I still don’t know if I’ll be even able to make it to first nights accommodation ‘cos there’s just been too much snow!  The NWS forecast notes over the last few days have only been slightly less apocalyptic than those that were going around just before the ark was launched.

But that’s this afternoon’s problem.  Getting this far (LA) was remarkably hassle free.  Trevor volunteered to put himself through 3 bouts of traffic to get me to the airport nice and early where people STILL haven’t latched on to online checkin.  And for once my seat selection strategy worked perfectly with a row of 3 seats to myself in the somewhat exclusive version of cattle class upstairs.  Still got bugger all sleep but at least managed to not sleep in a variety of positions including lying down. Standard hour or so to get through customs and once again so impressed with how quick and simple checking back in with Southwest was.  So was back through security with two hours up my sleeve and started mainlining coffee to try and wake up.  Now if I can just get from Sac to Tahoe …

What was I thinking ??? Of course, as soon as I said things were going well the flight to Sacramento was delayed an hour. Oh well, gives them more time to plough the roads into Tahoe I guess.

By the time we waited on the tarmac for 30 mins for another late connecting flight was more like 2 hours delay.  And of course my ultra cheap car rental rate ended up going up a fair margin once I wanted an AWD but still ended up a pretty good rate, and by 3.30 I was finally heading out of Sacramento Airport onto I5.  Good news was that chain controls had just been lifted on both major roads into Tahoe and it ended up being a relatively benign drive other than the last climb and descent into Tahoe as it was now well and truly dark and a bit snowy.  28 hours door to door.

Not only was Doug in the same motel he was in the room next door.  Wandered down the street for essentials and grabbed a pizza on the way back.  All is good.

This entry was posted in 2017 USA skiing. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Day 1 Mon Jan 23. MEL – LAX – SMF – South Lake Tahoe (hopefully)

  1. Malcolm Sinclair says:

    Mick,
    You’re getting quite good at this, aren’t you?
    Enjoy,
    Malc

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *