Lake Tahoe Wedding & Napa Valley 2009

Road to Tahoe

After a very long drive from Chicago, at long last, Lake Tahoe appears. We have vacation! She flew, I drove. (We both drove back together).

Lake Tahoe Panorama

An unexpected panorama of the multi-hued Lake Tahoe waters. The different depths causes this banded appearance. The unexpected part of the pano is that it is made up from two landscape shots many frames apart. When post-processing the lake shots, I found these two similar pics, and decided to let the stitching software (Panorama Factory) go at the two frames in fully automatic mode to see what would come out. Other than manually eliminating a duplicate of that boat, it pretty much came out decent, I think. cave_rock_pano_cyl

Stars in the Water

Sparkling crystal clear waters of Lake Tahoe. Some say you can clearly see objects 60-70 feet down.

Tahoe Queen

One of two tourist paddle boats operating twice-daily from the shores. This is the Tahoe Queen, which is docked next to the Riva Restaurant and I think is somehow connected to a resort next door and to the east of the Riva. The other paddle boat, a third iteration of the original, is the M.S. Dixie II, docks along the Nevada side. The first wasn't named Dixie ;-) The lunch cruise ($46) and the dinner cruise ($81) are both 2½ hours in length. If you tour the resort with the 90-minute timeshare sales pitch, they might comp either of the cruise prices. We actually did neither, as a storm was approaching the one day we had left. There's always next time, right?

Covered Boat Docks

One of my ongoing subjects was this triad of boat houses along the shore next door to our resort. Since the waters were only a foot deep, they don't get much use these days.

Covered Boat Docks

And in different light.

Covered Boat Docks

And yet again.

Stars in the Water 2

There is a very very long dock on the southern shore of the lake, which I first spotted on Google Earth a few months before the trip. This is a neck-wrenching and body contorting view from one of the newer lower side platforms nearly a ¼ mile out.

Diana

She likes to wade in freezing water. It's her thing.

The Shore

Shells. Obviously.

Colored Kayaks

Near that long pier were a few rows of kayaks stacked up on shore. The subject proved to be irresistable.

Emerald Bay

A small and intriguing drive up Hwy. 89 past Camp Richardson is Emerald Bay, at the SW corner of the lake. Fanette Island in the middle. More on that in the next shot.

Fanette Island

Fanette Island has a ruin of a teahouse, built by Mrs. Lora Josephine Knight in 1929, and was used only a few times a year. Nearby is Vikingsholm, a stone Scandinavian inspired castle, which is open to visitors in the summer months. Mrs. Knight owned the whole bag of wax at one time, including the island, Eagle Falls (next up), and surrounding lands.

Teahouse

The Canon 400 L and a 1.4xTC helped get a little closer look at that teahouse ruin.

Eagle Falls Bridge

A bridge over upper Eagle Falls on a hike we did at Emerald Bay.

Eagle Falls

Lower Eagle Falls. My Tamron lens cap fell into these falls when taking this; I risked certain death to retrieve it seconds later. If it was a standard Canon lens cap, I would have let it wash away into the bay.

Trees with Sun Star

I don't know what tree species these were (looked a little like Aspen), but they were flowering at the time.

Gull

There are gulls. And more gulls. And they scream all day, morning and night. Getting pictures of gulls there is like shooting fish in a barrel, which, by the way, I plan to try one of these days. In the meantime, I bring you this first gull.

Gull 2

And this one.

Gull 3

Here is another gull. That's it. We're now done with the gull series.

License

So here is why we went to Tahoe. The Mrs. has always liked the area, so we thought it a right thing to have ourselves a remote wedding outdoors from a cliff overlooking the lake.