Climbing in Pinnacles.

There's almost no water at the reservoir.

The weather at the end of November continued to be pleasant — warm and sunny, and so we had organized a biking excursion with a lunch. It required Hippo and I first moving one of our cars to the restaurant's lot and then riding more or less the same route on bikes, with the children. Lisa was whimpering a bit, although we kept exclusively on paved surfaces. Lisa does not like dirt road along the ponds behind our subdivision, and I don't blame her; it's fortified by a fine gravel, which makes you unpleasantly vibrate on a bicycle. Furthermore, Lisa has been going through a phase when a twenty inch bike is too small, but a twenty-four size is somewhat large, and it seemed wisest to wait with an upgrade till spring. We hope that by then Tom would have grown a bit, too, so we're going to buy him a larger bike and Lisa will inherit his seven-speed twenty-four incher.

It stayed pretty on the next weekend, and so we packed our bikes and drove out all the way to Santa Cruz, to Wilder Ranch. We tried to ride there once before, but Hippo's road bike then did not fit the terrain. Now that we all own trek wheels, we could enjoy a trail that winds along Pacific Ocean cliffs. The edge is heavily populated by gulls and pelicans, who land so near to the edge that you get the feeling they're within your arm's reach. It was the first time in my life I have seen wild pelicans this close. Naturally, we had forgotten to bring along a camera, and the trip with bird raids is not documented.

We did document our all family excursion to Pinnacles on Sunday, but honestly — climbing pictures mostly consist of somebody's bottom view, and that's no art. However, I'm proud of having successfully organized the trip's logistics. Pavel and I had driven out early in the morning, leaving Vendula and Hippo to their favorite pastime (sleeping in), while the kids lounged in front of the TV in their pajamas. The laissez-faire part of the expedition then had arrived several hours after the athletic one, and proceeded in touring the caves. Hippo and the kids subsequently headed back home (to prepare dinner), while Vendula managed to hike High Peaks, returning home with the climbing part of the group.

Thus the kids opened their vacation. It seems that somebody had taken to using their brains when planning the school calendar this year, and all the time off makes sense. During the Thanksgiving week, a large portion of children skip school on account of traveling to their relatives. Declaring the whole week a school break was quite merciful for us as well, although we typically don't visit anybody. Instead, we took a well deserved leave from the tiresome cycle of all our extracurricular activities, driving up and down, and finishing home work in late evenings.

On the lift.

Skeet and trap shooting range.

And I could also finally take the kids out ski boot shopping — that is, Tom. Lisa was protesting that she always gets hand-me-downs, and so I reassured her that Tom was going to get used boots as well. Given the speed at which the children keep growing, buying brand new sports equipment makes no sense — and buying it ahead of time would be completely crazy. Still, ski boots were one of the items that I had to fit in the car. We were moving all our stuff to Kirkwood for the whole season, including skiing clothes, bedding, sleeping bags, tea kettle, playing cards, DVD movies, towels — and food for four days. Packing it all into our subaru was quite a puzzle, and thus we were leaving rather late. Subsequently, we were hungry already in Tracy, and tried to find something for lunch there — it was Thanksgiving, a major holiday. We were losing all hope, afraid of the worst case (that only some McD and similar fast food things would be open, in which case I would vote for starving), but Tom suddenly exclaimed that he spotted a Vietnamese restaurant; and he did indeed — we were rewarded by an excellent soup and we even managed to order Lisa's favorite crispy noodles (mì xào dòn), which we had to do in our broken Vietnamese, as they were not listed on the menu.

We had reached Kirkwood right before they closed the ticket office — I wanted to let them check our season passes and confirm that they were active; I did not want to spend the following morning stumbling in ski boots between the line to the lift and the line to the tickets, trying to resolve some obligatory clerical error.

We met the Kovars in the "cabin" who just finished unloading their car, and continued to Tahoe to participate at a Thanksgiving party with their friends. We heated up our turkey breast and enjoyed a rare occasion of having the single bedroom apartment all for ourselves. On Friday we went to grind down the singular operating slope. Lisa was making upset faces when the lift dudes asked her if she needed to have the funicular slow down — yes, she still looks extremely pettite.

Going around and around is enjoyable for a limited time, especially when all people present on the mountain are there with you — from experts rushing straight downhill to parents who carry desperate little beginners in their arms across hardest parts of the slope. The mixture was spiked up by an excessive presence of ski (pa)trolls, who were berating the aforementioned experts, which I had somewhat welcomed. Until the moment when I realized that our children, too, belong to the expert group, and I had to involved them in a discussion about "not being alone on the slope" and "not doing anything crazy". I think that in the end it was better having only an easier run open at the start of the season — kids, eager to get back into their groove, could not hurl head-first into some foolish drop-offs.

Behind bars.

Today's Virginia City is a tourist trap.

On Saturday we abandoned running around on the one and only lift, and ventured to Carson City, Nevada. There's a skeet shooting range there, and we had never shot skeet before; it seemed as a good alternative to the miserable skiing. To some of us, that is. I had found very soon that skeet is absolutely no sport for me. Whether it's because I practically can't see through my right eye, and thus I lack proper perception of perspective, or whether I am simply too dense about some detail — I simply cannot hit the clay pigeons no matter what. Even Tom shot better than me, and my sharp-shooter's pride and reputation (and cockiness - Sid's note) had suffered severe injury.

Lisa did not want to shoot at all (and she would probably not be able to wield a shotgun; even for Tom, a 20-gauge was too large and heavy), and so we continued, for general entertainment purposes, to nearby Virginia City. This formerly gold-mining town has transformed into a tourist trap, but they have a beautiful museum there, and the main street still looks like a real Wild West scene, despite all the modern, shiny cars parked there. On our way back to Carson City we purchased a full set of Joker playing cards — and Hippo noticed while paying that he was missing his driver license. We hurried back to the shooting range (where they hold your license while renting you the lane and the gun), hoping they'd still be open, although it was dark already. Right on the parking lot we ran into a chap who had instructed us earlier — and who hollered at us from afar that they had it in the office and that they were already worried what to do with a forgotten ID from another state.

I made up for my shooting defeat in the evening. Kovars had returned and during this long winter evening we began to recall rules of the Joker game. Sid and Vendula did not remember it at all, and Pavel and I were coming up with fuzzy memories — but I outplayed them all with an incredible score offset. There you see, what you learn as a kid, comes handy when you're old.

On Sunday we again scraped the one and only open run; kids enthusiastic that Pavel and Vendulka would ski with us. When I failed to convince my offspring that they were hungry, Pavel suggested that I might have to bribe them with icecream to make them leave the lift. In the end, Kovars' departure helped — they had a snack and went off to hike, we only had a snack and drove back home. It amused me that an e-mail from Vail (the owner of Kirkwood resort) awaited me at home, congratulating me to having cycled at least ten times on the same lift. Our pases have RFID chips and the lift gate counts as you pass by, generating statistics into your skiing profile that's auto-forwarded, but it was simply funny — as if I had a choice (and if I did, this very lift and slope would really not be it).

Cross-country meadow.

Rolling in the snow, without athletic achievements, is also necessary.

Snow had not arrived during the following week, either, and so we stayed at home on the next weekend and drove out to get our Christmas tree. There are pictures we took during this undertaking, but both children are captured making horrible faces, and I look as usual (not good), thus they are unpublishable. Still, we got a tree — and this year it looks different. We normally bring home a fat, round fir, while this year we got a skinny, elegant model. Children had enjoyed decorating it, but Tom was mostly eager to install his train set from grandpa around the foot of the tree. Which he completed in record time, spurning Lisa to complement it with a horse farm. And so, while the rest of the world arranges a nativity scene under their Christmas tree, we have a Tehachapi Loop (our favorite railroad artifact, combining trains with a horse and cattle farm).

This does not conclude the horse list; I also alternate between training with Gary and visiting Foxy. When I first noticed a pimple on my arm, I did not pay it much attention. Within a week my pimples multiplied and I concluded, basing it on internet research, that it was a flea. Horses don't have fleas, but goats at the ranch, and rescued cats that would not fit in anybody's home and ended up living at the ranch, do. So does the local rotweiler Max, and the whole forest of wild animals surrounding it (the ranch is located on open preserve grounds, rich in raccoons, mountain lions, coyotes, rabbits etc.). Hence I declared a general flea cleaning of our household, creating a main decontamination room in our garage and apportioning sections for various kinds of laundry, bedding, dawn jackets (we pack warm clothing for outdoors even here, in California) — simply EVERYTHING. And I started to do BIG laundry. Naturally, the Annual Christmas Drain Clog had to choose the same day to occur. I tried to push it through, dissolve it with various solutions, but to no avail. Sid continued in these attempts in the evening, and he did not succeed either. We took our sleeping bags (bedding being still in line for decontamination in the garage) and went to bed. We gave up in the morning and called plumbers. As soon as I put down the phone, Sid made a last attempt with chemistry — and cleared the clog. Now I had to quickly call to cancel.

Eventually I managed to wash most of our things during Friday, and we could leave for Kirkwood again in the evening. Children had bathed at home, changed into clean tees and sweatpants, and only switched into their sleeping bags at the mountain "cabin". They seem to cope well with our nightly transports now — which is great, for leaving on Friday noon is difficult as it requires early release from school and work, and leaving later in the afternoon makes no sense (for roads jam so much that we would spend easily five or six hours driving instead of the regular three and half).

On the ridge.

Lack of snow is noticable.

Skiing got better with some new snow, but Lisa was fixated on playing outdoors. Eventually we agreed that we could extend our morning skiing, have a late lunch, and then the kids would go play in the snow, while I would test out my cross country skis. You need to have a separate pass to use the tracks, which required me to have another fight with the local office. It consisted of me handing my last year's pass to an athletic young man behind a counter and telling him that I would like to purchase this year's pass — for our downhill permits, they simply "loaded" this year onto our old physical cards, and that was that. The young man hesitated and said that they did not do it there. So I asked him, what he meat they did not do it, when only about two minutes earlier this here miss had offered it to another customer. The young man turned red and called for reinforcements, namely another similar dude who seemed to earn his other income by selling Herbalife (his smile could not be a work of nature). Said dude glanced at my pass and declared, "But you already have a pass." I think I did not howl loudly, but I'm not certain. I agreed that indeed I had, but it was a last year's pass, and if it meant I get this year for free, I'd take the deal. Alas, it was not free after all, and only a half hour later I held my NEW PASS. And that was well, for as soon as I ran on my skis out of our "cabin", a stringy, athletic senior citizen caught up with me, and she did not turn out a good-natured granny in need of a friendly chat, but a local pass inspector.

Cross-country track show clearly how miserable the snow cover was — as long as I moved along northern slope and in a grove, it was OK, but when I began to return on the other side of the meadow, the track on the southern slope melted away. After twenty minutes of cursing I gave up and traversed back to the north side. I did not go cross-country skiing on Sunday at all, but we had exhausted ourselves skiing downhill. The kids turned their gazes to their favorite gully under the lift, and so we went to check out a bit of terrain. There, the kids mostly waited, pinned to the slope, and encouraged their poor mother ploughing and edging down the tube. Every time I caught up with them they just spiked off, and with the lightness of elves disappeared behind another turn.

Our elf Lisa, however, refused to join me and Tom in skiing an un-maintained slope with bowls. And I think it's her loss, for the snow there was nice and soft just right, and you could practice slalom. Sid and Lisa were first to leave, and Tom followed later — and I went home for lunch only after my knees were properly shaky. We drove away with the impression that it was not bad for the start of the season, and the mountains got a good base. This would, however, require some cooperation from weather, and another load of snow, which, alas, does not seem to be coming.