Our final week of exchange is scheduled for Modesto, but our weekly host, Chris Currie, takes a broad view. He owns a holiday house at South Lake Tahoe (that's a shack for Aussies and a bach for kiwis...). Even thought Tahoe is nowhere neat Modesto, and is in fact out of the district, it is so beautiful that Chris was keen that we see it. He also thought that we could probably have a nice relaxing recharge time. He and Jenny (his wife) are very generous people.
Incidentally, the Currie holiday house is named 'Currie Whare' which is a New Zealander joke. 'Wh' if pronounced 'F', so the name is pronounced something like 'Curry Fa-ri.' And Whare means home or something similar (please correct me if I'm wrong here). Anyway, it's a clever, if nerdy, joke. Of all the team, I should have appreciated it, but it went straight over my head I'm afraid...
Chris and Jenny couldn’t head straight to Tahoe with us because their daughters were involved in a musical production, so we headed up with their good friends Jeff and Ashwini and Jeff's twin sons Kyle and Eric. What a fortunate turn of events! Chris and Jenny were great fun the whole rest of the week, but we might not have met Jeff and Ashwini without this side trip. They were lovely, so we were wrapped!
Jeff, Ashwini, Will, Sarah & Chris kick back.
At the lake we enjoyed great scenery, great company, great wine and a great time. And we didn't sleep enough. None of this is all that unusual. What is unusual however is that we didn't present at any Rotary clubs, and we didn't have any formal visits to any local businesses! It was a nice change, but I think I had withdrawal symptoms!
We had lunch at a very interesting buffet style tepinyaki restaurant. The customer’s task was to select a bowl of raw ingredients and then took them to a large central BBQ plate where they were cooked in front of you. Yes sir, yes sir, I had 3 bowls full, including plenty of calamari… Nice. Made one mistake though. One bowl had some very attractive looking roasted garlic cloves. Michelle had about 5 and I had about 10 (across my 3 bowls). Lucky we aren’t all sharing the same room? Oh, hang on, we are…
Michelle and her Tahoe Adonis
After lunch we did some preliminary sightseeing, scoped out the local casinos and then got ourselves settled in at the cabin. Sitting around chatting, blogging, drinking and laughing was heaps of fun!
Errol checking out the are
We headed to the hard rock in the Hershey’s Casino for dinner. Glen and I had grnad plans to sneakily pay the bill, but even though we snuck off early to get it, we’d still been beaten to it by Jeff! Sneaky these Americans… Dinner was good fun and afterward different members of the group talked, drank, sang and danced and gambled. We straggled home to the cabin in a few small groups… I think the plan was to have a rest. Things didn’t quite go to plan… Now, that would be typical of the trip so far!
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