Donner/Tahoe development, Truckee, California
The cabin we’re staying at is part of the Donner/Tahoe development, an area of rapid growth on the Donner Lake, meaning California, side of the resort areas. (The Donner Party, as some of you may know, was a group of 1800’s era westward-venturing pioneers who, through stubbornness and incredibly bad choices, ended up in dire straits of a cannibalistic nature. So the powers that be apparently named a lake and resort area after them. My own thought is that there must be an easier way to achieve immortality.)
We went down the shoreline park of Donner Lake in the late morning. The water was a bit chilly for my liking despite an increasingly rising temperature, but Jared and Erin spent a lot of time splashing about, and in the end I may have been the only one who found the high mountain lake too cold for my tastes. Everybody else in our group—Bernard, Liz, Mark, Christine, Jared, Joe and Helen—splashed around a little bit. I was content to sit and read (for the umpteenth time) Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.