In february, Soph’s company had their annual offsite in Tahoe. The whole company and their families go for a weekend of fun. There’s skiing, snowboarding, spas, food, drinking, the whole bit. So, on friday, the weekend of, we all got on a big bus loaded down with a lot of booze and a lot of nerds, and off we went. If you’ve been on this kind of bus trip (and who hasn’t?), you know they’re always chronically late, beset by delays, and can be fairly miserable. This was at least well-organized, and well stocked with booze. We set off at the appointed time for what should have been a four hour drive. We immediately hit traffic on the Bay Bridge. Fairly smooth sailing from there to Sacramento or so, with just a case of motion sickness. Then, we started getting into the mountains and the traffic started getting worse. Since it was a bus full of nerds, we all had google maps out the whole way and knew the delay was coming. We drank whiskey and waited, and then, past one checkpoint, we tried to get some guys who were putting on chains for $20 to put them on the bus, and nobody would. So, some of the passengers ended up helping the driver get the chains on to get past the second checkpoint. This all added about 2 hours, plus the stop-and-go traffic the whole time. We were supposed to be there by dinner time; it ended up being around 9:30. We were on the bus to Tahoe for something like 7 hours. We ran out of whiskey, beer and toilet paper (not in that order). We ran out of snackfood. The bus didn’t break down, though, and we made it over the pass. Finally. And the hotel was gorgeous.
