I've been traveling around a lot lately, and it's been a wild ride for a Hubbard girl who didn't visit much of anywhere except Hershey, Pennsylvania, until she was a grown-up. I didn't fly in an airplane until I was in college, didn't leave the United States of America until I was 20, and I didn't see an ocean until after I was married. So all the traveling I've been doing is still a little bit out of character for me, even though my life has changed a lot since I was in my 20s.
Some of the traveling that I'v been fortunate enough to do has been fairly adventurous. There were some plane rides where the flight attendants were a little bit snippy, and one was obviously drunk, which was frightening. I've ordered things in restaurants where the waitress didn't speak English at all and I ended up eating a face. And I've been to places where it made sense at the time to go up onto high things that were not very safe.
I'm not complaining. I'm a very lucky girl. But sometimes it's scary being this lucky. Last week my husband and I were driving around Lake Tahoe and we got to a section of road where there were no guardrails on either side of the two-land road. Let me put that another way: There was a road and there were cliffs and the number of guardrails was zero. And yet another way: Not to point the finger of blame, but who exactly was in charge of putting up the guardrails? This should definitely go on that person's permanent record.
This trip to Tahoe was the result of bullying by a number of people who, upon finding out that we've lived in California for more than forty-five minutes were aghast that we hadn't been to Tahoe yet. "Oh my god. What did you just say? You haven't been to - I can't even, oh my god. You have got to go to Tahoe."
It took us two years, but we went to Tahoe. I wasn't here very long before I figured out that the California-experience bullies were right. It's a pretty awesome place. One of the first things we did was get in the car and drive around the lake. Lake Tahoe is 21 miles around the second deepest lake in the country. To be specific, it's very very extremely deep. The lake was created 3 million to 5 million years ago when an earthquake type thing happened and a big bowl was made. Between 1 million and 20,000 years ago, glaciers got shifted around and melted and filled up the bowl with water. Unless you're a Creationist and then it was created in the 1930s by someone with a liquor license and a big backhoe, who wanted to make some dough.
It's very rustic around Lake Tahoe. Most of the hotels are not hotels at all, but lodges. Even in the more high falutin' places, the chairs and bed headboards are made of logs and there is no air conditioning. If you're not into outdoorsy activities (on the California side) or gambling or prostitution (on the Nevada side), your best bet is to drive around the lake, where you get a feel for all the little towns and you get to see some of the most amazing views of nature you can imagine.
So of course my husband and I did that. It never occurred to me that this tourist destination that hasn't really been updated since that first liquor license would go the way of the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower and every other tall thing I've ever been up on and not worry one single iota about the possibility of a scared Hubbard girl falling off. I'm starting to think that the people in the world don't care about me or my well being much at all.
When I was at the Grand Canyon I blew out a couple of veins in my forehead over this one little kid who was perched precariously on a stone wall about the height of my knees. She didn't want to be up there and her mother wanted her to sit there so she could get a picture of the cavernous drop behind her. "Get up there. Now!" I heard the mother say. The fact that that little munchkin's face wasn't on a milk carton and she isn't living with me now as my kidnapped foster child is only because I forced myself to walk away from that scene and the Grand Canyon altogether before I suffered a stroke. I didn't think I'd be able to get that child to soccer practice or piano without the use of both arms.
We survived the drive around Lake Tahoe and once I resumed a normal heartbeat and breathing after the non-guardrailed part, we had a lot of fun. We took a bunch of pictures of scenery, stopped for coffee at a little cafe in Carson City where James Dean was on the women's restroom door and Marilyn Monroe on the men's restroom door, did some shopping, walked a lot, and went to lunch at a place where they had just about every issue of National Geographic on a shelf.
That was the first day. The second day we rented a boat. Did I also mention that I was afraid of water, wouldn't walk on the docks with my husband when we first met, didn't learn how to swim until I was in high school, and once almost drowned when my Tony the Tiger inner-tube flipped over with me in it, when I was 7?
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