Day 4, Tuesday, September 29, TRT TM 0.3—(9.0 miles)

It’s still dark at 6a. There’s no way I’m getting up in the dark if we don’t even go to bed in the dark. I got everything ready so when we did decide to start moving, we’d be able to get out of the tent quickly. We figure that since we’re 9 miles from town, there might be some early runners coming by as early as 8, so we needed to at least have the tent down by then. Ultimately, we were walking by 8. We can do it on our own.

A pleasant camping spot last night

We felt good today. Our bodies are finally readjusted to being on the trail. One thing we’ve noticed once we turned onto the TRT was that we are going steeply downhill. It was a breeze to get Bunny up and moving this morning. We made the first 2 miles in well under an hour. We were a bit surprised to come upon a trail re-route because of logging. Another thing we’ve noticed since entering the Tahoe Basin is that there is much less fuel on the forest floor. The logging is surely related. 

Early morning view of yesterday’s route

We ended up passing through a very nice neighborhood. I’m sure there aren’t a lot of crappy ones around Lake Tahoe which makes our relocating here highly unlikely. The best case scenario is that this blog leads to a book deal which gets turned into a movie of our hiking adventures. We’d be able to afford to but a house here. BUT we’d be a one trick pony and we’d end up losing the house through back taxes. We’d end up in a double wide. We could have just stayed in. Southern Illinois. Who wants all that headache?

This would be ideal for bears…I’m getting fed up with them not showing up

When we entered the woods again, we only had 4 miles left to Tahoe City. It’s hard not to imagine living here and snowshoeing into town on winter days for lunch. An eight mile round trip would keep us from getting fat. There are so many empty houses here with all the rich people having 2nd and 3rd homes. Maybe we should look into caretaker positions or squatting. There’s a huge future in squatting in our lives. 

A detour because of logging

Someone had built, what appears to be a wood fired pizza oven, in the woods outside of town. This still looks to be used in the winter time. Maybe, under normal conditions, even this time of year, but with a total ban on fires in CA, it was just sad seeing a pizza oven sit unused. It made me depressed, and hungry. 

Fires are currently outlawed because of the drought
I pointed out to Bunny that the oven is almost 70, a mere 10 years older than she

The final half mile of trail is right along the Truckee River in town. Tahoe City has done a good job of developing bike and hiking trails through town to make everything easily accessible. As we got closer to Lake Tahoe, we began to smell meat cooking. Nothing gets the stomach juices flowing like a dead cow in a fire. We stopped in for a riverside burger at BridgeTender. It wasn’t even noon, yet.

Tahoe City is the start of the trail
The pedestrian bridge across the Truckee River

From there, we went and got a hotel room, did our shopping, showered, and did laundry. We are all set to head out of town at the crack of 11 tomorrow morning. All that’s left is the high brow Presidential Debate this evening. Life is good in Tahoe. We should all move here. 

All the trails right in the middle of town!
The smell of dead cow drew us right in

EFG