Rest Day in South Lake Tahoe — 0 mi, 0 ft
Today was an exceedingly rare morning in which the team was slow to get ready and out the door. I’ll go ahead and type out another line so you can read the sarcasm between the lines.
As of 11am, I had just woken up. When I walked out, I found Aarushi and Carmen in the hot tub – Drew joined them shortly. Caroline was diligently working on posting blogs. Nunu had also recently woken up and was lounging about. Tatiana was somewhere in the city getting her legs waxed.
As of 12:30pm, Tatiana had returned, and she and Drew swapped places with Tatiana joining in the hot tub while Drew went to grab a burger from Five Guys. Meanwhile, the rest of the team made themselves avocado toast, while Nunu and I attempted to make an itinerary for the day. We repeatedly had to push the “leave the house” part of our itinerary back as we watched the day slip away from us.
The difficulty of itinerary making stemmed from the fact that Drew had blown out his back tire two days prior on the ride into Tahoe and needed it to be replaced. We had originally thought there was a Trek store in North Lake Tahoe, where we wanted to go spend the day at a beach and hiking, but it turns out Drew had discovered a non-existent Trek store and, instead, the store was in Reno.
We ended up scrapping the hiking part of the itinerary to make time for repairing Drew’s bike, and decided to leave at 2pm towards the beach, have Drew drop everyone off and go fix the bike, and then meet us back at the beach after the ~1 hour drive both ways to Reno. By the time he got back at 5pm, we would head back and make an end-of-spokes/last-rest-day dinner, then sleep for our very climby 100 mile ride out of the Sierras tomorrow.
We received several eye rolls when we declared that we needed to leave at 2pm, in 30 minutes, since people didn’t think it would happen – which, to this day writing this blog after spokes has ended, I’m still not sure why this was thought as a herculean task since it was more than enough time. But as they say, “Fool me 287 times throughout the summer, shame on me”, because at 2pm only half the team was ready, Drew walked in with his burger in hand, and Tatiana walked out of the bathroom looking about the same as she did 30 minutes ago.
In any case, we eventually made it out the door, but not before Aarushi ran back inside to grab her headphones to listen to her 7 hours of audio messages to herself for her blog from the 200 mile ride a few days ago. Throughout the ride, much of the car was focused on catching up on blogs, including a particularly egregious Tatiana who was trying to avoid DOUBLE lapping (e.g. her next blog day was tomorrow, and she hadn’t finished her blog from 2 weeks ago).
Driving to the beach took a bit under an hour, and we arrived at a boat ramp area that strictly stated “No Drop Off”. Well no matter, we’ve ignored much more threatening signs before and decided we would loop back around, quickly get out of the car, and have Drew drive off. Unfortunately, “quick” is not in the vocabulary of much of our team so half of us got out quickly while the other half was still packing up their stuff in the car, so Drew drove off to do another loop with half the team after a big boat pulled up behind us.
On the third loop, the rest of the team got out but Caroline forgot her sketch/drawing bag in the car, so she ran after Drew to get her stuff from the car. Unfortunately, by this point we had exhausted all of our allotted stealth and had caught the attention of some park rangers who proceeded to interrogate Caroline as she grabbed her bag out of the car:
- Park Ranger (PR): “Hey, you can’t get dropped off here! Tell him [Drew] he can’t drive away!”
- Drew hears this, and drives away.
- PR: “You have to get back in that car!”
- Caroline (C): “I can’t…” (The car had driven away).
- PR: “Who was that?”
- C: “One of my friends dropping off some stuff for me”
- PR: “Where did you come from then? How did you get into the beach?”
- C: “I walked in from the trail”
There might’ve been some more back and forth but in the end Caroline just walked away while the ranger furiously radio’d people over their walkie-talkie. When Caroline met up with us, she quickly changed into her swim suit to avoid being recognizable, and then we continued peacefully with our beach day.
By now it was ~3:15pm, and the others got ready for beach activities while I went on a run down a super pretty bike trail that ran alongside the lake.
Pictures from the trail I ran along the lake.
When I got back, everyone was gone, so I grabbed some snacks and went looking for them. I found most of them jumping off some rocks in the distance, and Nunu much closer when she jumped out from behind a bush to try to scare me – not much luck there.
She had been walking back to where our stuff was to grab our floatie when she spotted me, so we walked back to inflate the floatie. Nunu had come up with the brilliant idea that we should swim the floatie around a cove of rocks to bring it to the rest of the team, instead of just walking 3 minutes with it. She managed to rope Tatiana into the idea as well, but the floatie only made it about 10 feet off the shore before the three of us gave up and walked it over.
We walked over to where Carmen, Aarushi, and Carmen were sitting on a rock, dropped the floatie in the water, and began paddling it towards some deeper water. Some yelling immediately ensued about “bring the floatie over here [to the rocks]”, “just come swim to the floatie”, “I don’t want to swim to the floatie”, “just swim”, “the water is cold”, “you’ll get wet either way”, “why didn’t you guys wait for us to come down from the rocks”, and some other chaos like that.
All this yelling was interfering with my relaxation, so I decided to swim off and go lay on some rocks where I could listen to the calm crashing of waves instead of the loud crashing out of teammates.
At this point time started to dilate since I was going in and out of micronaps and I didn’t have my phone on me to check the time (it was back with all our stuff, this will be important shortly).
At various intervals of ~30 minutes I briefly checked on the status of the team. First I saw the floatie wasn’t in the water anymore, but I saw the team walking off in the distance. A bit later, Nunu found me while I was peering up from my rocks and joined in some rock laying. Again a bit later, we checked again from a distance, since at this point we had been at the beach for a while, but saw that all of our stuff was still all over the place, the floatie laying fully inflated, and Caroline appearing to be drawing on our picnic blanket. Clearly, no plans on leaving any time soon, back to the rocks we go.
After maybe 20 minutes lying down (again, neither of us had phones so we don’t really know, but it felt like 20 minutes), we checked again from a distance. All of our stuff is gone. Uh oh…
We walked back to where our stuff was and sure enough, it’s all gone: our phones, shoes, clothes, snacks, etc. I looked around in the sand expecting some sort of message written out for us or a hole hidden by leaves with our phones in it so we could communicate with them, but no such luck.
We walked around the beach aimlessly for a while, not sure if they left us to get groceries and would come back to pick us up, if they forgot about us, or maybe were enacting some cruel punishment on us for not checking in with them sooner. We asked some other beach goers to use their phones, but like most modern Zoomers we don’t know any of our friends’ phone numbers, so we just tried calling our own phones hoping that the team would hear them buzzing. After a few calls, we gave up and went back to aimless walking, hoping the team would show up out of nowhere to save us from desolation.
It’s quite surprising how immediately helpless you feel without your phone: we couldn’t call an Uber, couldn’t get directions home, couldn’t call to see where everyone was, couldn’t get a pizza delivered to our location. Yep, at this point, hunger was setting in and it was becoming clear that we only had a few hours left before we would have to resort to cannibalism. Either way, with no water, we could probably only survive 1-2 more hours.
It was at this point that bad turned into worse. We look over to where our stuff was before and THERE WAS A BEAR.
Ok the cannibalism was a joke but this is serious, there was actually a bear like 10 feet away from us. To be honest, the worst part of this whole situation was I didn’t have my phone to take a picture of it for the blog.
We stood around with some other beach goers at a probably-not-that-safe distance watching as the bear slowly walked across the beach past us and up to a big dumpster looking for food. It jumped up and looked into it for a while, at which point I realized that Nunu was holding a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips… we’re done for…
The bear must not have a very good sense of smell because eventually it gave up on the dumpster and just kept walking towards the other side of the beach. Or maybe it just doesn’t like vinegar chips, me neither. In hindsight, I don’t get why the beach had a bunch of bear-proof trash cans everywhere if they were just going to leave an open dumpster in the middle of the parking lot.
At this point, we went back to trying to find a way to contact the team – now with a bit more urgency. To do so, we had to keep walking in the direction that the bear had walked off towards though. Eventually, we found someone who let them use their phone, this time we planned to call Nunu’s mom who had Aarushi’s number.
But right as we were about to call her mom a park ranger started yelling, “GET OFF THE BEACH! THE BEAR IS COMING! THIS IS SERIOUS, GET OFF THE BEACH! GO! LEAVE YOUR STUFF! YOU NEED TO GO NOW!”.
This could not have been the best way to deal with this situation, surely inciting panic just causes more problems. Across today, the Sand Beach State Park Rangers definitely left a bit to be desired.
But anyways, we handed back the phone and walked off (calmly) away from the yelling park ranger towards the visitor center, still wondering what we were going to do. It was at this point that we spotted the iconic orange top bag in the distance. We ran towards our salvation, and ran into Caroline, who had apparently been walking up and down the beach asking if people had seen “a shirtless curly hair guy probably wearing a hat and a short Asian girl”.
We hopped into the van and exchanged stories with the rest of the team. Apparently, they didn’t know that we didn’t have our phones and just packed everything up to meet Drew when he said he was arriving at the beach.
At this point, we headed back to continue our plan of cooking dinner for our last rest day. We stopped and picked up groceries, then headed home and everyone worked on cooking a delicious meal of burgers, baked potatoes, fruit, corn salad, and mac n’ cheese.
Everyone working hard on cooking. I, of course, was in charge of supervision and photography. Just kidding, I helped too, I swear.
Drew, who was in charge of burgers, may have cooked them too well done on the grill outside and had to move to the pans on the stove. This, of course, naturally led him to throw the patties into a pan of hot oil and splash oil all over himself, giving himself second degree burns on his arms and legs.
A picture of Drew’s burns the day after.
Besides this, the cooking went pretty smoothly and we enjoyed a very yummy last dinner.
Afterwards, Drew, Nunu, and I super quickly cleaned up all the dishes and kitchen and then we all went to bed for the first of our upcoming back-to-back century days.
– Nate
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