Matt & Dani

Dani and I both were really looking forward to this trip. Neither of us have ever been to Tahoe before…. yes that’s correct, we've never been, and yes, we’ve lived in CA for our entire lives… The trip was setup by Dani’s Mom and boyfriend Vidal who live in Vegas. The main purpose of the trip was to get all the kids together and enjoy some family time but it was also to celebrate her Mom's 50th birthday and to throw Shane & Lucia a baby shower!

The trip started for us at 5am on Thursday morning when we started the drive to Tahoe. I took us just about 3 hours to get there with potty & coffee breaks. The drive was beautiful and you could feel the temperature dropping as we approached the lake. We got there at 8am to see almost everyone awake. We all sat around for a bit and chit-chatted, I can’t remember the last time we were all together like that. Besides her Mom, Vidal and us, there were Shane & Lucia (with baby), Marcie and Josie. After talking for a while we finally decided to go grocery shopping to get a bunch of the food we’d need for the next couple days. We ended up BBQing almost every meal since the rental house provided it. Vidal cooked up some killer chicken & corn while we enjoyed a few beers. After dinner we sang Happy Birthday to Mom and headed off to the casinos at her request. Normally I’m psyched to go gambling but for some reason I wasn’t really in the mood, which sucked because I don’t get to the casino all that much. Dani, myself, Shane & Lucia ended up leaving after a couple hours and headed back to the house to bake cookies and relax in the hot-tub.

Friday morning we planned to have the surprise baby shower for Lucia & Shane. Since we needed Lucia out of the house in order to set everything up, we pretty much made her go to the grocery store with us so Dani, Mom and Marcie could get things ready. When we got back from shopping, Lucia was totally surprised. Dani made her one of those diaper cakes that came out amazing, the girls also cooked banana cupcakes and all the baby gifts were displayed. We almost got a few tears out of Lucia but she was able to hold’em back. While we were away the girls also cooked breakfast which we dove into right away. After breakfast is when we played a couple baby shower games (baby food tasting & smell the diaper) and then we finally gave them their baby gifts (see if you can tell which one came from Uncle Matt!!). For the rest of the day we relaxed and played games… badminton, Mexican Train dominos, put together a jig-saw puzzle and played Catchphrase. While at the store in the morning I decided I’d buy all the stuff to whip up a batch of Grandpa Tafoya’s famous salsa… needless to say it was nearly gone by the day’s end!

Saturday morning started off early and slow for me. Apparently the neighbor across the street decided to pick that day to have landscapers come to rip out bushes and replace everything with stones… They must have started dumping rocks at around 7am. Once I’m awake it’s hard for me to go back to sleep, so I got up, made some coffee and took a walk with my camera to try and get some photos. Everyone else slowly woke up and we had breakfast together again. After breakfast we really didn’t have any plans. Before going to Tahoe I talked to a couple friends about things to do and one of them mentioned something about hiking trails near Emerald Bay. Dani and I asked if anyone would be interested in going to check it out and everyone was, so off we went! It took about 30 minutes to drive out there and the views were amazing. First we went on a short hike up the hill to Lookout Point. From there we almost had a 360 degree view of the lake & bay. We took some family photos and headed back for the longer trail. The second trail took us along side the bay and slowly crept down to water level. We found a great little beach area where a huge tree had fallen into the bay… of course we had to climb all over it like little kids. After a little break we headed back to the cars and back to the house for BBQed dogs & burgers. Shane & Lucia headed home shortly after eating as Shane had to work early the next morning. The rest of us hung out at the house for the remainder of the evening and played some more dominos.

We all headed out on Sunday morning around 7am. We stopped at Denny's for a quick breakfast and then all hit the road for home. It really turned out to be a great little vacation with family, we made a lot of good memories! Ask Josie about Fraggle Rock. Anyway, I really enjoyed the cool weather, good BBQ and getting away from the TV & Internet. By the way, the neighbors yard turned out pretty good.

Click HERE to see all the photos.

P.S. Most of us knew that Shane & Lucia are having a boy (even though we weren’t supposed to know) but we didn’t know that they had chosen a name, Owen Lawrence Morasci!!
-M