The Ansley Blog: Day 1 - Family Roadtrip

We decided that it was time to head to Arizona to see Grandma Cynde and Grandpa Bruce before they hit the road this summer for Alaska. I'm big into visits with the Grandparents. I decided that it should be a road trip, which is totally my style of making vacations into epics. I've been wanting to see the snow and visit the Eastern Sierras all winter. (I love snow!)

The Eastern Sierras are really remote. In the winter, only a couple passes over the mountains are open, but it's worth the effort. The Eastern Sierras are very steep and dramatic set against the desert basins that run into Nevada. I charted our course from here to Phoenix, AZ over a week. The plan was to drive around 4 hours each day during afternoon naps and do fun things every morning in each new location. The first leg was a nighttime drive to South Lake Tahoe so the kids could wake up in the snow, though I was a little worried going over Echo Summit at night in winter.

Made it just fine - Jeff drove. We woke up in our hotel right on Lake Tahoe surrounded by snow! The kids and I checked out the frozen beach.

Jeff had to work (to finance said trip), so the kids and I hit some local sledding. On the internet, we found a nearby family sledding hill - Hansen's tubing and saucer hill. Using my GPS phone, we drove right there (amazing). It turned out to be these crazy luge-like tubing runs. It looked terrifying. I thought the kids would be so traumatized that they would never sled again. Little did I know my kids.

First, the luge runs/ice tubes were so long that I couldn't take one kid down on my lap while watching the other one who waited behind. I'm a paranoid mama. So, I begged the guy who ran the place to please let Sylvie try her own tube so we could go down together. Even though she's not quite 5 (the minimum age), he was fine with it. He gave her the cutest tiny tube and then read her the riot act on how to keep her butt up off the snow (ice).

I was sure she would flip off the thing and the first day would be a disaster, but I pushed her off the top anyway. Down she flew at like a million miles an hour. Rex and I hopped on our tube and took off after her. Rex was squealing and screaming with laughter the whole way down. As it turned out, so was Sylvie. She LOVED it. I tried to upload an amazing video of Sylvie going down the tube, but I can't get it to work. I'll keep trying.

We trudged up that hill for the next two hours to go down the same runs again and again. Rex would just stagger back up to the top, but refused to quit. They cried when we had to leave to pick up Jeff at the hotel. They are still talking about tubing. We'll definitely be back to Hansen's again next year. ($15 per person over 5 yrs old, which means we paid $15 for 2 hours of FUN).

After some gratifying burgers at "Big Daddy's Burgers," a name the kids are still giggling over, we stuffed our Daddy into the Subaru and headed into Nevada. We drove down the Eastern Sierras towards our next stop in Mammoth Lakes, CA (someday, my dream posh ski vacation). On the way, we were rewarded with unparalleled mountain scenery and chased by a snowstorm that eventually caught up with us in Mammoth Lakes. We stopped briefly at Mono Lake, one of my favorite spots on Earth. Really, you haven't seen anything until you've driven up over Tioga Pass from Yosemite down the eastern side of the Sierras to Mono Lake - trust me. We tromped around outside the closed Visitor Center taking in the view. Here are some pictures from the drive, including Mono Lake.