Himmerichs Near and Far

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Lake Tahoe

We had a great time on our trip to Lake Tahoe. We drove the first 5 hours on the first day, which brought us to Lone Pine, CA and the base of Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48.

This Mt. Whitney and the area called Alabama Hills. It's a really popular place for movies to be shot, in fact, they were shooting a movie when we were there! We couldn't tell what it was, but I think it was a Western because they had a big stagecoach standing by.

Manzanar Relocation Camp near Lone Pine is where they had the Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

This is the memorial to the Donner Party near Truckee, CA, which is right next to Lake Tahoe. The Donner party was stranded here in the 1846 when they tried to take a shortcut while traversing the Sierra Nevadas in a wagon train. The height of the rock base is how high the snow was that year.

Squaw Valley was home to the 1960 Winter Olympics.

Squaw Valley is now a really nice ski resort. This is the "village" at the base of the mountain.

We took the tram to the High Camp and went snowshoeing.

View from the tram, it was super steep!!

Monday, January 23, 2012

ticklish

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Orange County

Ryan had Monday off for MLK day so we decided to check out Crystal Cove State Park in Laguna Beach in Orange County. It's only about an hour drive for us. We had hoped to do some hiking in the mountains but all the trails were closed due to bad conditions (though I don't know what those bad conditions were...). Luckily, there's a part of the park that is on the coast, so we hiked around a little bit on the beach and cliffs on the coast.

Newport Beach (in Orange County) is also where John Wayne lived later in his life, and his yacht, the Wild Goose, is docked there. It's now owned by a cruise company and it goes out for special events. Since Ryan is such a John Wayne fan, we went to see the Wild Goose and also saw John Wayne's grave in Newport.