Happy New Year! (Tahoe Trip)

Happy New Year!
Looks like it's finally 2016 - nothing's really changed, and it's just another cloudy day in California.
I went on a snowboarding trip to Lake Tahoe, so today I'll be uploading a couple of pictures from a Nevada ski resort. We left on Christmas Eve and went skiing on Christmas Day and the day after.

Here's a picture of the US Route 50 sign in the snow. It looks like there's a picture of a poppy on the top.

I was pretty excited since I had fallen asleep in the car and woke up to a snowy landscape. In the morning, back in a warmer part of California, it was raining.

Here's a picture of the road. Earlier we saw a car wreck, in which a couple of people were standing around a car that had crashed into a tree on the side.

This is a picture I took of a flowing river. It's later in the afternoon by this point, but it's pretty dark because of how cloudy and snowy it is. I was surprised to see that the water wasn't frozen.

another picture of the river

Now here are a few pictures from Tahoe Town (that's a name I just made up), where we stopped by to grab some food.

We stopped by a Safeway to stock up

a green light

kind of cool - a Rubik's Cube electric panel. I think in Taiwan they liked to paint nature scenery on these things

 We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Tahoe Town. The food was actually pretty good, and the tea was fragrant and warm. When we were pretty much done with our meal, the waitress came over and offered to replace our tea. I thought she was just being a nice waitress, but when our receipt came, we realized their plan all along: they had charged us per pot of tea.
I suggested we dump all the leftover tea from the pot into another container so we could get our money's worth, so we put it into a Starbucks cup that previously held some peppermint cocoa. Yes, that was a little cheap, but tit for tat, y'know?

Now here are a few pictures from the ski place.

Early morning on Christmas Day - sunny with a few clouds.

another glimpse of the mountains. As the clouds indicate, later that day it snowed.

Here's a view of from on top of a ski mountain after you get off the lift. If you look closely it says the elevation on that cubicle kind of thing.

 Here's a warm lodge where we rested before snowboarding/skiing some more.

 

Here in the picture you can see Lake Tahoe on the left.

Here's a picture of my feet. I ended up doing quite a bit of walking since there was a lot of flat ground (and snowboards can't move on flat ground)

Picture of the ski slope when stopped to put on my feet straps

Another picture, taken in the afternoon as the sun was setting.

Looks like there's some kind of X in the sky due to the vapor trails left in the sky.

The bottom of a ski lift, closed at the end of the day.

Here's a fake fireplace - it's gas-operated and the logs are actually made of cement or something, since they don't burn. It's used to regulate the temperature of the room.

That's about it for today. I'll probably be uploading more California pictures since I've been on a few biking trips to a few parks in the past week.