Day 22: Oakland to Tahoe to Reno

Day 22, Saturday, was the Fourth of July, which found us going from Oakland, California, to Reno, Nevada. We began the Fourth with a great lunch at some place near Chronica’s where we went to get fried chicken sandwiches and strawberry shortcake. This place was fabulous. It had no indoor seating, but it did offer a series of steel ironing boards outside as tables with little wooden stools for sitting. The line was out the door, but it moved very quickly. Once inside, some very friendly person would ask you what you wanted. Your choices were fried chicken sandwich, fried chicken salad, or egg salad sandwich. The fried chicken sandwich was essentially a little crusty hoagie roll with several huge pieces of spicy fried chicken breast and a whopping helping of a homemade cole slaw product made of cabbage, oil, red onion, cucumber, and spices. It was a huge, delicious mess. I didn’t have my camera, so I took pictures with Monica’s camera, but I forgot to get those from her.

The strawberry shortcake was equally outrageous. It was a small salad-sized plastic container filled with delicious, dense shortcake, strawberries, and whipped cream. Dave and I ordered two, but we only ate one, and saved the other for breakfast on Sunday (it was still delicious).

After lunch, we went to a hat store, but it was closed for the Fourth, and then we headed to a guitar store called Fat Dog’s Subway Guitars. It was a tiny little story filled from floor-to-ceiling with guitars of all sizes and tunings. Many of them had clearly been there longer than I’ve been alive, but it was still a pretty cool place. The ceiling was papered will unique Obama posters and posters supporting the FMLN rebels in El Salvador—quite an unusual combination. We also saw an acoustic guitar with a bizarre scene of cowgirls and flowers on the top. Wacky! The guy who worked there was very nice but VERY, how do you say… “laid back.”

We headed back to Chris and Monica’s, packed our wares, and headed out.


From their place, we headed north to Muir Woods at the recommendation of Chris, Anita, and several others.


It’s a forest north of San Francisco that has lots of giant trees in it. We were duly impressed. This tree trunk indicates that at the time it fell in 1930, it was already 1,000 years old.



This photo is deceptive as it looks like we are standing before an enormous gigantic tree when really it’s three or four trees growing together. Still stunning.


This photo gives a pretty good example of what we’re dealing with here.


This tree was alive but had a weird hollowed out place in the trunk.


Yes, I actually counted these rings on this other tree trunk, and I’m indicating about 100 years of growth.


As we were leaving the park, I spotted a little place by the fence with this sign.


No one was using the corner for this purpose, and I’m not sure who would, but it was noteworthy nonetheless.

As we left for Lake Tahoe and Fourth of July fireworks, we stopped for some drinks and ice for the cooler. Dave came out with this:


It’s It is an ice cream sandwich made with oatmeal cookies and vanilla ice cream and then covered with chocolate. He claims that it’s like the U(nidentified) F(rozen) O(bject)s that he used to get with his dad as a child. Thus, I had to take these photos.


Well, we put them on ice in the cooler and ate them later that day. Yes, they had melted. Yes, it was pretty disgusting. No, we did not keep the third one. It was sad for everyone involved.

We received an offer the day before to join Chad and Whitney in Sonoma to spend the Fourth with his folks, and we debated it for many hours, but we finally decided that we needed to be moving on to Tahoe. It was a sad decision, but sometimes we need to make some tough decisions.

We got to Lake Tahoe just in time to settle in for the fireworks. We pulled in where the GPS sent us and parked about 4 blocks from the El Dorado Beach at Lake Tahoe, grabbed our picnic blanket, and followed the herds headed lakeward.


When we got to the lake, there was a wide, steep beach that was filled with wall-to-wall people. We saw the tail end of the sunset.



We settled in for what we were promised as “the largest pyro show in the West.” I think they meant West Tahoe because it was not show-stopping in our estimations. Frankly, while we waited for our show to start, we were able to see fireworks from three other towns on the other side of the lake. That was impressive.

There were some cool shapes in the fireworks. A few of the works were smiley faces in yellow with red eyes and mouths. I’d never seen that, so I got a kick out of it. All my attempts at pictures of fireworks—even on the fireworks SETTING—yielded nothing but blurry messes. Boo hiss.


When the show ended, we had not had dinner yet, so we each ordered a chili dog from the hot dog stand parked there at the beach. We each got chili and mustard on our dogs, which, as it turns out, might have been a bad idea. I’m not sure who taught those folks about hot dog chili but it wasn’t my mother-in-law. These people had the soupiest, messiest chili. While it was delicious, it was not intended to be eaten in the dark.


Once we washed the chili off ourselves, we headed to our final destination for the night: the KOA in Reno. Our KOA was in the process of being bought by a casino next door. We didn’t visit the casino because we were afraid of going broke so far from home. Sad.

For those who went to Vegas with us over Memorial Day, we did notice that there’s a Circus Circus in Reno, too! You’re never too far from disturbing icons of consumption! YAY!

After a long day in the car and out of the car, we crashed. Nite nite.